If you are passionate about innovation in finance, we invite you to participate in BarCampBankSeattle.
When & Where
Dates: July 21st - 22nd, 2007
Location: 
MiKiJio Arts
Meals: Breakfast & Lunch will be provided on-site, along with beverages and snacks.
Costs: We invite sponsorship from interested organizations, and will ask for participants to contribute $35.
- People and organizations interested in in sponsoring this event should contact Jesse Robbins.
What is a BarCamp & BarCampBank?
BarCamps are part of an international network of “unconferences“. They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. Many focus on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The name is a playful allusion to its origins, with reference to the hacker slang term “Foo Bar“. The BarCamp movement arose as a spin-off from Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only unconference hosted by open source publishing leader, Tim O’Reilly.
BarCampBank events are organized internationally to foster innovation in banking, credit unions, and finance. BarCampBankSeattle will be sixth BarCampBank event and the first held in the United States.
For more information on this event, please go to the BarCampBankSeattle wiki page or email Jesse Robbins at jesse.robbins@openaid.org!
July 2nd, 2007
We’ve started organizing BarCampBankSeattle, which will probably be the first US BarCampBank meeting. A sign-up form and more information will be posted to the wiki and discussed in the BarCampBank group.
A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.
BarCampBank is a community organized around the following mission:
The aim of BarCampBank is to foster innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance.
Here’s an article about “unconferences” like BarCamp in BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_20/b4034080.htm
May 14th, 2007
Allegra and I met yesterday with Joe Edelman of RipplePay which looks really cool. I really like the ability to create loans of time… “I owe you 1 hour of work”.
“Ripple is a monetary system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks. By cutting out the institutional middlemen, Ripple is both more community-oriented and more efficient as a means of exchange.
National monetary systems rely on trust in large financial institutions. A bank account balance, stored as electronic bits in a computer, represents a promise by the bank to pay the account holder. That promise is only meaningful if the bank is trustworthy. Banks, in turn, leverage those deposits to issue new money by making loans to trustworthy individuals as determined by an often labour-intensive screening process.
Ripple cuts the banks right out of the picture by allowing anyone to act as a bank and grant credit within the Ripple system to anyone they know. The system keeps track of the source of all IOUs, so that debts that are not repaid are automatically borne by the issuer.”
April 22nd, 2007
