What could ebarts do?

 

A local pub commits to making a regular donation of ebarts to the kids football club, run by parents on a Saturday morning.  With the ebarts the club pays a local dressmaker to make football shirts with the club emblem on;   it rents space in the garage of a nearby pensioner, to store goalposts; and it starts a ‘daddy-share scheme’ where dads are paid to bring kids whose parents can’t bring them to the club.  The local pub offers a pint of the guest ale to the first twenty customers after 6pm on a Monday, in exchange for three ebarts. The guest ales are advertised in the football club newsletter.  As a result the pub is now full on a Monday evening.

 

A Hospice cannot afford to look after its garden, so it rents out the land in ebarts to local people as allotments, on the condition that patients are free to wander round and help if they wish.  With the earned ebarts, and a donation from the local greengrocers, they pay a carpenter to create a herb garden with seating in the centre of the allotments.  The greengrocer offers deals on produce, this increases sales and is useful for shifting perishable stock - ‘for today only, 2 punnets of strawberries for only 1 ebart!’.  The Greengrocer also sells produce grown on the allotments for ebarts.  This business expands to selling other produce such as marmalade and pickles produced by locals.  The greengrocer now has a very loyal customer base.

 

A residential care home for the disabled, run by a national charity, has lost 8% of its funding, this amounts to over £100,000 a year.  Some of the help it needs can be done by local people for ebarts, but the medical staff and equipment need to be paid for in sterling.  A 22 year design graduate has moved back home after university, and is working for a call centre, bored out of her head.  The residential home asks her to develop a brand and marketing materials for them in return for ebarts.  Turns out she is a fantastic campaign manager, and she secures a three year commitment from the local Robert Dyas store (for sterling), and organises monthly events for their staff.  She now gets asked to design things for local businesses and individuals and gets paid in ebarts, and in sterling.

 

A 40 year-old mother of three is feeling guilty.  Her recently widowed father lives over two hundred miles away, and she cannot get to see him without feeling she is abandoning her children.  On ebarts.com she looks for someone local who can pop-in and see him three times a week, in return for her visiting their elderly parents.  She cannot find anyone to do a ‘direct swap’ with, however, using ebarts she does make a ‘five-way swap’.  It becomes apparent that her father cannot cope with the cooking and cleaning, and his visitor doesn’t have time to do this for him. But the visitor knows anunemployed single mum who would be happy to do this for ebarts, as long as she can bring along her two-year old.  The widower loves having a child to play with.  The single mum earns enough ebarts to pay for childcare, so that she can work as a hairdresser three mornings a week in the local salon.  The no-longer-feeling-guilty mother sets up a group of ‘surrogate carers’ on ebarts.com.  Membership grows to over forty thousand, so that there is someone in every locality to look after relatives that live far away. 

 

Endless possibilities…

 

Because ebarts is a network, rather than an organisation, it will become whatever the people who join it, make it. 

ebarts uses technology and features which are familiar, and similar to those already in use by millions of people.  It is an open, transparent, self-administering, and self-regulating community.  The system is not prescriptive about who can do what – which gives it the ability to grow organically.

 

Most importantly, it translates the social networks which are flourishing on the internet, into trusted networks of exchange in local communities.