I’m very happy to announce that The Free World Charter has just logged its sixty-thousandth signature!
I admit though this is a somewhat double-edged milestone for me. One the one hand I can’t help but feel mildly disappointed that this is all we have to show after eleven years of promotion, when, for me, the principles are so self-evident and so many other change movements gain millions of signatures in much less time, but, on the other hand, I am absolutely delighted that so many people did say yes anyway!
Perhaps the Charter has yet to have its day, so you can be sure I will continue to promote it until more people take notice and see for themselves the sheer sense of re-designing our social contract around nature and nurture for the health and prosperity of all.
If you’re new to the Charter, I would ask you to please read these ten principles and endorse them if you agree. This will help us make strong case for making this kind of change to our society. (Available in all major languages)
If you’ve already signed and are perhaps wondering what comes next, then please read on and I hope you’ll discover as I did that the Charter is really just the beginning…
The Charter, as it stands today, is just a statement of aspiration. It’s obviously nowhere near being adopted in people’s lives, but wondering how it might be adopted sent me on a personal journey which has, to date, manifested in five major projects. Each in their own way, these projects solve a small piece of the puzzle towards carving out this brave new future, and I’m immensely proud of each. They are:
1. Sharebay
We are building a global network of people sharing free goods and services! This is the post-money world in action. Obviously it’s small with just under three thousand members, but many are already seeing that this app has the potential to literally create a whole new way of doing things.
Everyone who joins can post a listing of a free offer. It can be a physical item or a free service. You can even request something, but everything on the site is given freely. And when you give something away, your transaction is counted. This helps us keep a record of all the generous actions so we can show others that it works. To date, we’ve had many fantastic free offers, from lift-sharing, books, musical instruments, translation services, marketing advice – even offers of free land in the Ozark Mountains!
My hope is that some day, sites like this will come to challenge the conventions of trade and money by offering people other, better ways to access the things they need. It’s still a growing network of course, so please sign up today and get involved.
2. HonorPay
HonorPay is just as it sounds – a way to pay someone in gratitude and appreciation. It’s free (of course) and offers people a meaningful way to display public appreciation of someone. It can be friend or a loved one, a popular public figure, or even just the person who helped you fix your flat tyre.
HonorPay is a way of conveying respect and honoring people just for being good people. I believe it’s time that people’s reputation and status was linked to the good that they do, and not the value that they extract. HonorPay is a free, open award system. (It’s also linked to Sharebay) Sign up if you don’t have an account already and decide who you’d like to Honor today.
3. The Open Access Economy Wiki
At some point on this journey, the need arose to create some definitive documentation on the post-money idea outlined in the Charter and give it a more precise title. And so, drawing on the popular open access science literature movement, extending that desire to encompass an entire economy seemed to make sense, and thus the name Open Access Economy was born.
I founded the wiki in around 2017 and it now has hundreds of pages of articles and links of interest. And of course, being a wiki, you are invited to participate and help us build out and improve the ideas so that we have credible specification documents of the ideas we propose and share. Please sign up and contribute if you feel you have some knowledge to share.
4. LifeGames
Looking to our education system as the source of effecting real world change was always inevitable on this journey, so, in 2019, myself and a team of amazing talent got together to compile this compendium of kid’s games that teach empathy, cooperation, compassion, resilience and much more. We called in LIfeGames.
Designed to be used in a classroom setting, we ran a pilot program across nine schools in the UK and Ireland and the feedback was conclusive: the kids loved it, the teachers loved it and they all found it enormously helpful. We also made a cool little video about it to help our promotional efforts.
Unfortunately we ran into logistical problems with maintaining our promotional effort in getting this out to schools. It’s a big job that we seriously underestimated and it just became too cost- and time-prohibitive to maintain. However the body of work still stands and is available to purchase on Amazon. I truly hope to see this project reinvigorated if we can find the right people to help with promotion. (If that person might be you, please contact me)
5. Ongoing writing projects
Even though all these projects are important, my writing holds a special place for me and is possibly the one I’m most excited about. My short, free ebook Into The Open Economy has been downloaded many thousands of times and is available in 8 languages and in paperback from Amazon. It’s possibly one of the more accessible introductions to the idea of post-money and I’m very happy about that.
Finally, my novel F-Day: The Second Dawn Of Man has gotten amazing reviews on Amazon and, conceited as this may sound, I think they’re right. Something extraordinary happened in the writing of that book that it transports you somewhere that you might not want to leave. I really felt like I was channeling something while writing that it almost wrote itself. But that’s not even the best part.
There’s talk of a movie version. And I’ve been quietly working away on a screenplay version of it with a view to bringing it to a big studio. I’m incredibly excited about this as you can imagine because this story contains some really powerful elements that I really think would blow people’s minds on a big screen. No more spoilers, but if you’ve read the book I think you’ll probably know what I mean. It’s on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and audio version. (I also supply free ebook versions on request)
The Journey Continues…
If you’ve signed the Charter—and you’ve read this far—let me say that I’m so glad that you’re taking this journey with me. I feel like there are millions of us out there right now searching for answers. We all know we can do better than this. We all know we’re in trouble on lots of levels. We all know what’s at stake.
I think it’s OK that so many of us searching for answers have wildly different opinions on what those answers might be. A post-money world is just one suggestion. Maybe it’s not the right one. Maybe there are better ones. But one thing is certain: we are already undergoing a process of change, and between all of our seemingly conflicting efforts, we will arrive at the best solution. I’m sure of it. I hope we can all be proud of whatever little efforts we are making to expedite this process.
Thank you,
Colin R. Turner,
October 2022.
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