One network, many platforms,
Community Exchange Network is growing

Greetings friends

As we take another step toward a future free of the transactional, extractive nature of the current money paradigm, we offer this newsletter as a morsel of hope in a world that seems to be losing its mind.

After all, what are we all playing at?

Is the purpose of this life to maintain the status quo?

To be good boys and girls that stay in our lane ... while ever more extreme forces create fanciful excuses for another war or justification for the continued gaslighting of the relevance of a monetary measure for the valuing of life?

Or are we here to invoke cooperation, care, beauty and joy into the experience of life?

And if it is the latter, where else can we engage but in proximity to our own local communities?

Given our newsletter's likely audience, we'd guess you are committed to the latter.

Do let us know what is on your mind by writing to us at cen@community-exchange.org

Enjoy your read ...

 

In this issue: Who's joining us · People and places · Under the hood · Read, watch, listen

 

Who's joining us

CommunityForge joins Community Exchange Network

Matthew Slater, co-founder and developer of the CommunityForge platform and architect of the Credit Commons protocol, has accepted our invitation to become a member of the Community Exchange Network. In his words: "It looks like CEN is becoming the 'centre of gravity' I always hoped it would. I would be very happy to be officially a part of it." Community Exchange Network's goal is to bring together the people building the bridges as well as the platforms they connect.

HUMANs officially joins Community Exchange Network

HUMANs (a global cooperative network for mutual aid) has formally accepted CEN's invitation to join as a member, and CEN is joining HUMANs in return. This mutual membership makes official what has been true in practice for months: our organisations share values, share infrastructure, and increasingly share the work of building alternatives to Big Tech dependency.

We have a website

The Community Exchange Network now has its own home on the web, a front door for the network that presents our partner organisations, our shared vision, and what community exchange is about. No longer just CES: a network of networks.

Come say hello — Community Exchange Network Discourse forum

A shared space for stories, governance discussions, cross-organisation dialogue, and the kind of conversations that don't fit into a weekly call is now live at cen.discourse.group. Members from CES, TimeOverflow, CommunityForge and HUMANs are already posting. Come join.

Finally meeting in person — Belgium, October 2026

CEN members meeting

After years of working together through MetaProvide — the Nextcloud-based collaboration platform where our governance documents, chat, video meetings, and day-to-day discussions all happen — some of us will finally meet face to face in October. MetaProvide has been far more than a video tool: it is the shared workspace that makes CEN's distributed, international way of working possible.

Esteve, Sergi and Matthew will attend the MoDi (Monetary Diversity) conference in Brussels, while Mark, Maarten, Olivier and Liam will join the HUMANs retreat in Belgium that follows the conference. A chance to deepen collaboration with the organisations and people we have been building alongside — and to put faces to the names that have become familiar through years of weekly calls.

One network, many platforms

The most important strategic direction for Community Exchange Network: it is not one platform that does everything for everybody, but respect for the diversity that exists in our ecosystem and practical bridges between platforms. Community Exchange System (CES), Komunitin, TimeOverflow, and CommunityForge each serve different communities in different ways. The goal is for groups on different platforms to discover each other's offers and eventually trade across boundaries. Federation — the ability for groups on different platforms to trade with each other — has moved up the priority list by consensus, and we are exploring federation protocols. Decentralisation makes us more resilient; interoperability makes us stronger together.

Building bridges across the ecosystem

Community Exchange Network has been in conversation with a growing number of organisations in the community exchange and complementary currency space, not to merge or absorb, but to coordinate, learn from each other, and make the wider movement more visible. Connections include Swaptacular (Bulgaria), the Mutual Credit Services network, Grassroots Economics (Kenya), Regenerate Community, and the Monetary Diversity Network, which has invited CEN to Belgium. The ecosystem is larger than any single platform, and CEN's role is to be a connector within it.

 

People and places

Real groups, real exchanges — Community Exchange System 2.0 pilots are live

Three communities are now trading on our new platform: BuutVrij! in Amsterdam (Netherlands), and two groups in North Carolina (USA). Alongside these, a Community Exchange Network's Time Bank lets team members log volunteer hours — making the work visible and eventually convertible into credits in each contributor's own local community currency. A Japanese-language pilot is being prepared with Hamish, and an Indian group has been created by Suhail. These are not demos — real people, real exchanges, real feedback.

Listening to CES Australia

A dedicated session in August brought together Australian admins (Rita, Cathy, Fred and Jessie) to hear directly what they need and what frustrates them about the current system. The message was clear: the real barrier is not technology but getting people to trade; the platform needs to be simple enough that it does not get in the way. We also met Emmanuel Balogun from TimeXchange in Cape Town. Real voices, feeding directly into priorities.

Find us on the map

Exchange groups are now automatically published to the Murmurations index and displayed on a dynamic map showing active communities across the network. If your group is active, it is on the map. The map includes Komunitin, CommunityForge, TimeOverflow and Community Exchange System (CES) groups, giving us a single, living picture of community exchange worldwide.

News from our partner organisations

Community Exchange Network is a network of networks. Here is what our partners have been up to.

Community Exchange System (CES)

The CES legacy site and its sibling, the mobile app, remain the main platforms serving thousands of CES users. Together, these are known as CES1, the original CES software that is soon to be replaced by CES2, our new software approaching launch time.

No development is taking place on the original "desktop site", but there is always some maintenance to be done, especially when the infrastructure is changing and being updated. The mobile app has been upgraded to align with the new software. This is not an attempt to compete, but to get users used to the new features that they will encounter when they make the change. Administrators continue to make requests for new features, and these are added if they will benefit all users and do not introduce additional features that will not be implemented on the new software.

TimeOverflow

TimeOverflow is an open-source platform, available as both a web app and a mobile app, to facilitate exchange among members of a timebank. It was built in 2013, mainly through volunteer work, and several people have contributed to its maintenance and development since then. We still have a backlog of issues to fix and ideas for new features, and we need funding to speed things up. We have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help sustain the project. If you want to support us, please make a donation and spread the word.

Komunitin

Komunitin has been working on the tech side as usual. These last few months, the focus has been on building a new backend for the platform's social features and sign-in system, allowing us to replace the dependency on IntegralCES, the legacy software still working behind the scenes. The first benefits are improved speed and security, and better searches. But the bigger step is setting a solid foundation — making it easier to add features that help people connect and exchange, such as distance filtering, reactions and marketplace federation.

CommunityForge

CommunityForge has been busy upgrading the infrastructure that powers their network of more than 200 community exchange sites. The team is modernising the hosting platform that supports all CommunityForge groups; this is a significant piece of work that will keep the platform current and maintainable for years to come. They are also joining CES and HUMANs on the shared email server in Ljubljana, as part of the "Mutualising Technical Resources" initiative led by HUMANs. The work is in its early stages but looks promising — another step towards cooperatively managed infrastructure across the network. Matthew Slater will be attending the MoDi conference in Brussels and the HUMANs retreat that follows.

HUMANs (Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks)

HUMANs are doing a partnership sprint in Europe this October. Stephanie Rearick and Gorazd will present at the Monetary Diversity Gathering in Brussels, then host two days of satellite events focused on cooperative business models, international alliances and housing commons. A smaller group — representing HUMANs, CEN, CommunityForge and the Monetary Diversity Network — will then retreat to a fledgling eco-village for in-depth work on tech development, funding, governance and communications. The trip ends in Lisbon at the 6th International Conference on Social and Solidarity Economy and the Commons. Read Stephanie's full post and support the trip

Under the hood

Our emails have left Big Tech

CES is now 100% Amazon-free. All our emails are managed through the HUMANs mutualised platform — a shared European mail server in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is not a cost-saving exercise; it is a deliberate choice for sovereignty and cooperation over convenience and dependency. CommunityForge has also joined us on the same server: three organisations sharing one piece of cooperatively managed infrastructure.

Sharing infrastructure — doing more together

Beyond email, we are working towards mutualising more infrastructure with HUMANs: shared privacy-friendly analytics (replacing Google), shared backups that are not dependent on any single provider, and shared identity services, all European-hosted and cooperatively managed. Not one organisation providing services to another, but peers sharing capacity and costs.

Komunitin and the Community Exchange System (CES) 2.0 platform keep improving

Smarter notifications that engage members, search that tolerates typos, offers sorting by proximity so you see what is near you first, a fresher interface, and better admin tools. The last dependency on the old system is being removed. French translations completed. Funded in part by Ecoxarxa del Bages through the EU Local for Local programme, and built entirely by volunteers and open-source contributors.

Connecting platforms through Federation

Both TimeOverflow and CES are actively exploring federation protocols (e.g. credit commons protocol), with the goal of enabling exchanges between different platforms and servers. The technical discussions are open and public: the Komunitin federation discussion tracks how CES2 could connect to other platforms, while TimeOverflow is exploring the same direction through their own federation issue. Two different platforms, converging on shared goals.

What do you actually need? Tell us

An analysis of the CES database showed which features are genuinely used by the 800+ communities on the platform. Trade levies (community contribution charges), sub-areas and local-area coordinators are the top priorities for CES2. A survey will soon be shared with hundreds of CES groups around the world to assess your priorities and make sure the new platform responds to your actual needs.

 

Read, watch, listen

The Marriage of Developers and Local Communities — Matthew Slater, Growing the Commons, Aug 2026. A hard-won lesson from years building software for grassroots movements: platforms designed in the abstract fail, while those co-created with real communities endure. Slater calls on developers to abandon "software for nobody" and tackle the messy, unglamorous work of serving actual neighbours.

Building Social Wealth through Mutual Aid — Stephanie Rearick (HUMANs / Mutual Aid Networks), interviewed by David Bollier, Jan 2026. From timebanking to restorative justice youth courts, Rearick demonstrates how communities can meet real needs through reciprocity and cooperation, proving that "the real wealth of our community" already exists among us.

Exchange Modalities: Rediscovering the Many Ways We Exchange — Tim Jenkin, Oct 2026. Money is one way to exchange value, but it is not the only one. Tim surveys the full spectrum, from mutual credit and time banking to gifting, swapping, barter and shared activities, and argues that digital networks make it possible for these older forms of reciprocity to coexist and complement each other at scale. Also available as a video.

Money: A World of Euphemisms — Tim Jenkin, Aug 2026. How financial language masks the fact that money, not value, drives our economy. Explores alternative exchange systems that prioritise human contribution over monetary scarcity. Also available as a video.

Transcending Money Consciousness — Tim Jenkin, Jul 2026. We've mistaken the tool for the treasure, treating money as the source of wealth rather than a record of human contribution. Jenkin invites us to embrace "exchange consciousness" — where value stems from our shared skills and community connection, not monetary scarcity. Also available as a video.

 

Did you know?

Get involved

See where we are. Visit the Community Exchange Network website and explore the world map and hundreds of community exchange groups across the globe.

Come say hello. Join the conversation on our Discourse forum — share your story, ask a question, or simply introduce yourself.

 

 

The Community Exchange Network brings together organisations and platforms working on community exchange, mutual credit, and timebanking worldwide.
Learn more at community-exchange.network
Contact: cen@community-exchange.org