Welcome to our latest CEN newsletter. It’s been a while since we’ve sent one out, and we want to start by thanking you for bearing with us, a lot has been happening. Within and across each of our communities, platforms, and the wider network, the pace of change has been remarkable. We trust that you and your communities are holding up under the accelerating pressures of our times. For most of us, staying close to nature and to community feels less like a lifestyle choice and more like a non-negotiable baseline for life right now.
Here is some of what we’ve been up to.
Who we are and where we’re going
Something meaningful has been unfolding in our Tuesday meetings over the past few months. Alongside the usual project updates, our team has been sitting with a bigger question: Who, exactly, is the Community Exchange Network?
It may sound like a philosophical indulgence, but it matters enormously — for the CEN website we’re building, for how we introduce ourselves to funders and potential partners, and for the communities who might one day choose to join us.
The picture that’s emerging is this: CEN is not a single platform, and not just a technology project. It is a global network of organisations: CES, TimeOverflow, CommunityForge, Komunitin, and others, collaborating to strengthen exchange-based economies through shared tools, shared learning, and mutual support. Non-monetary. Non-crypto. Non-commercial. A movement of people who believe that real community resilience is built on relationships, not on money.
Together, across all our member platforms, we now count roughly 11,000 active users worldwide. That is a meaningful thing. And it grows more meaningful still when we act together.
Across the network
TimeOverflow continues to be a close partner in platform development. Contributors from the TimeOverflow community have been helping with translations, the Dutch translation of the platform was recently completed by a TimeOverflow contributor, and are actively invited to join CES2 development at our Thursday tech meetings. Beyond the technical side, Sergi (TimeOverflow) has been a key voice in shaping our Tuesday governance process, introducing consent decision-making as a practical framework for the whole network. Maria has also been contributing through systematic quality testing of the platform, feeding issues directly back to the tech team. It is a healthy sign that the project is maturing.
CommunityForge — which supports over 300 French-speaking LETS groups — is an organisation we stay in close touch with, sharing news and development updates in both directions. They are still in the process of making a decision about their platform’s future, and we respect that process. In the meantime, a Swiss group that recently moved to CES has been wonderfully active: they’ve translated CES articles into French, built their own website, and expressed strong interest in joining CEN. This is exactly the kind of energy we hope to welcome more of.
We also attended a Monetary Diversity Network gathering in February, connecting with a broader ecosystem of organisations working on alternative economic systems. CEN is now part of a working group facilitated by the Monetary Diversity Network, with the goal of developing a federated marketplace — an area that aligns closely with what Komunitin/CES2 is already building.
The new shared platform is live
For those following CES specifically: the new CES2 platform is now live at app.ces.community, with first pilot groups active in England and the United States (through the HUMA Network). A Japanese community currency group is also keen to pilot. Their reception of Tim’s CES explanatory video, translated into Japanese using AI voice synthesis, was described as “electrifying.”
The platform has seen significant improvements since February: a rebuilt notification and email system, French translation, a redesigned community page with a member map, and better date formatting for UK users. On the infrastructure side, our app build packages have moved from Google Cloud to OVH (a French hosting provider), and we now have a real-time backup system syncing database changes to OVH’s S3-compatible storage: an important step for data resilience.
In parallel with the pilot, the team has begun building a wiki for users and administrators of CES2/Komunitin: a practical knowledge base covering the most common questions and tasks. It’s still early days, but the goal is to make it easier for any community to get started and self-manage with confidence: github.com/community-exchange-network/komunitin/wiki
Esteve is also carrying out a significant rebuild of the core service underlying the platform, replacing a legacy component that dated back to the original Drupal-based architecture. Once complete, this removes the last major legacy dependency from the platform and lays the groundwork for future capabilities such as location-based discovery and federation between communities.
You’re welcome to explore the platform yourself on our demo site: ces2demo.community-exchange.org
Login: fermat@komunitin.org
Password: komunitin (mutual credit group)
Login: riemann@komunitin.org
Password: komunitin (timebank group)
Governance: working better together
Sergi has been introducing consent decision-making, a sociocratic approach, as a governance framework for CEN. The idea is simple: rather than requiring full consensus (which can be slow) or letting decisions happen by default (which excludes people), consent asks whether a proposal is good enough and safe enough for the organisation. Objections are heard as signals, not vetoes.
This approach is being tested on real upcoming decisions, including whether to register the a domain name and whether to set up an Open Collective account to manage CEN’s shared finances transparently, without requiring a formal legal entity.
We’re also working toward a CEN website that presents all member organisations clearly: an entry point for communities, individuals, and funders to understand the full network, not just one part of it.
Fundraising
Alex and Hamish have been developing a fundraising strategy, reaching out to aligned publications and organisations — including the Schumacher Centre for New Economics — and identifying potential grant streams. An EU NGI (Next Generation Internet) grant application has been submitted, with up to €39,000 potentially supporting advanced features (semantic search and federation) for the shared platform.
As the team grows and ambitions expand, we are also exploring how to resource the work more sustainably, surveying how many hours contributors currently volunteer, and what additional hours could be committed with funding. The preferred model is to support existing trusted contributors rather than hiring externally.
Coming up: Collaborative Finance COFI 2026
CEN will be represented at the COFI (Collaborative Finance) gathering, running 21–28 June 2026 in Austria: collaborative-finance.net. Esteve will be attending, and this is an ideal space to deepen our conversations around federated marketplace standards and ensure CEN has a voice in shaping the interoperability frameworks that will matter for community exchange platforms going forward.
If you’re attending or would like to connect there, please get in touch.
Reading and watching: new articles, videos, and more
Several members of the team have been contributing articles to the CES website, it’s becoming a genuinely collective effort, not just one voice. New pieces appear regularly and are distributed via the CES mailing list and Substack. Here are the most recent:
- The Future of Exchange (Part 4) – Tim Jenkin, 12 May 2026 Exchange in an Age of Ecological Limits — how the ways we exchange shape the societies we inhabit.
- The Future of Exchange (Part 3) – Tim Jenkin, 12 May 2026 Money and Power: How Monetary Exchange Reshaped Human Society.
- The Future of Exchange (Part 2) – Tim Jenkin, 12 May 2026 Before Money: Humanity’s Long History of Information-Based Exchange.
- The Future of Exchange (Part 1) – Tim Jenkin, 11 May 2026 Exchange: The Hidden Operating System of Society.
- The Wealth Within – Olivier Riche, 6 May 2026 An invitation to unlearn the habits of scarcity and rediscover that wealth is not something you accumulate — it’s something you share.
- The Internet Has Given Us New Ways to “Do Money” – Tim Jenkin, 9 Apr 2026 If all a financial transaction does is update numbers on a ledger, why do we need “money” at all? Tim argues that the Internet has made it possible (for the first time in history) to record and coordinate exchange without any intermediary token, and explores the diversity of systems already quietly growing to fill that space.
- Can You Buy a House on CES? – Hamish Murphy, 1 Mar 2026 One of the most common pushbacks against community exchange is that it will always remain a fringe system, incapable of handling large transactions. Hamish takes that challenge seriously — and argues that with communities of thousands of active members, large transactions like buying a home become not just conceivable but manageable, through creative structures of collective lending, intergenerational balance, and community trust.
Browse the full archive at www.community-exchange.org/home/articles.
AI-assisted video content is also growing on the CES YouTube channel, written articles turned into short narrated videos. Alex and Tim are blending this with original illustration to give the content a more distinctive character. The growing video library is at community-exchange.org/home/ces-videos.
We’re always looking for stories from communities. If your group has had a memorable trade, supported a member through a difficult time, or found a creative way to grow your exchange, please write it up and send it to us.
A resource for any community: is your data truly yours?
From our friends at MetaProvide
One question comes up often in conversations with mission-driven organisations: “We know Big Tech isn’t safe, but what are our real options?”
That question is harder to answer than it should be. Most comparisons either oversimplify or go deep into technical territory that isn’t useful for decision-makers, boards, or community coordinators who need to make a real call.
MetaProvide, the European not-for-profit that provides decentralised cloud infrastructure for the CEN project, has built something for exactly that gap.
The HejBit Decision Framework is a free guide comparing centralised cloud, self-hosted, and decentralised storage across 9 criteria that actually matter: data sovereignty, vendor lock-in, resilience, compliance, operational complexity, and more. CES already lives the values this guide is built around. MetaProvide built this framework for organisations like ours that share those principles but sometimes need a concrete tool to make the case internally to a board, a new partner, or a fellow admin evaluating their options.
What’s inside:
- A side-by-side comparison table across 9 criteria, ready to share with your group, board, or team
- Three real-world scenarios that expose risks often hidden in “standard” infrastructure choices
- A structured framework to assess whether decentralised storage fits your organisation
It’s free. No strings.
Questions or want to start a conversation? Reach out to MetaProvide directly at hello@metaprovide.org.
Get involved
Whether you’d like to test the platform, translate it into your language, contribute to communications, or simply stay better connected with what CEN is doing — we’d love to hear from you (email: ces2@community-exchange.org)
With warmth,
The Community Exchange Network Team
The Community Exchange Network brings together organisations working on community exchange, mutual credit, and timebanking worldwide. Learn more at www.community-exchange.org.