Civic IT

As a kid growing up in PMB, I saw the Mayor. From my position about 20 paces from the dignitary, all I could see was his gold chain. To be candid, at the first glint of gold, I thought he had egg on his tie, but then, seeing the size of the mayoral chain, it had the desired effect. I thought “Wow. What a lot of expensive gold”. I think that Mayor was named Downes. Wally Downes, maybe.

In time, my dad let slip the word “blockhead”, about a mayor, I do not recall which mayor. The lesson was: my father did not automatically khombisa nhlonipho to mayors. Back then, mayors may have been more respectable than now, but that is not true of Howick. Mayor Chris Pappas is truly respected there. He has earned it. He is a hard worker, with enviable his Zulu fluency.

Anyway, in my musings about the mayoral chain and “blockhead”, my mind (like “Word Association Football”) comes up with ‘blockchain’, and that is my subject. It is simply:

Blockchain vs Corruption.

School Money

“Money money money money money money money … I want some mooooney” - Chico Twala

People concerned with how people handle money, from the Robert Kiyosaki & Sharon Lechter to influencer Anna Bocca, raise the point that we were educated on neither money nor business at school. I agree with Ms Bocca that this is because:

• finance has become impossible to understand,
• the rich intend to keep it that way.

Let’s just make money. I don’t mean, go into business, make a profit, and get rich. That ¹ has become next to impossible. Many commentators, more every day - it is becoming like 1950s ‘Ford vs Chev’ braai arguments - who are much more sussed about finance than me, tell us this: Yanis Varoufakis, Anna Bocca, Clara Mattei or Richard Wolff. Add politician Bernie Sanders if you think only economists think this way.

No, by ‘make money’ I mean something else.

A story. My mother once drove my six year old niece 3000 kms from Cape Town to Lusaka in a beetle. 2500 kms along the way she visited friends in Mutare. On arrival, she was told that the husband was ‘making your bed’. Puzzled and a little miffed that making her bed prevented him from simply emerging from the bedroom and greeting her, she eventually found him in a workshop. He stood, saw in hand, cursing quietly,tools strewn about. He was making her bed, out of wood sourced from a local sawmill.

That’s what I mean by making money. Crafting the stuff. That way, my vision is to accomplish a few things:

• train youth in coding
• create decent jobs
• involve youth in civic office+
• publish municipal expenditure
• prevent double payments

Even achieving one of these aims is worth it.

By making money I mean specifically, local crypto currency. Crooks are very smart, but if money is useless outside a town, there is no point to trying to disperse it to that great big gatsak in the sky, known as ’the cloud’. Blockchain code is just code. I am sure I could write it, but why reinvent the wheel? There are other ways. Although early crypto currency threatened to be dangerously heavy ², at least one coin creator has come up with a solution.

Pascalcoin

The wily creators of Pascalcoin had a few things going for them: they

• didn’t need money
• had computer science degrees and/or IT experience
• knew that carrying the entire blockchain around on all devices was impractical
• created SafeBox

Safebox conserves the integrity of the chain, while displaying only the last 100 transactions. Problem solved. From our standpoint, we need to find whether we can use, or fork, PASC. It is not widely regarded, trading at roughly one hundred of an American cent. Good! We can get in at the bottom!

PascalCoin is open source. That, for student coders, is a good place to start. My vision is this:

Colesberg Youth Pilot

After setting an exam, two learner coders who pass a test can be chosen as interns or apprenctices ³. They, and another two from any small town, and similarly qualified, can collaborate on a bare-bones civic budget template, to be coded in the Oberon programming language, running in the Oberon OS. Reasons and details are set out in the the proposal linked below.

If the pilot is funded and works, it can spread to municipalities country wide. The aim is return to resident block control, a la the UDF Civics movement, with even closer detail, to create decent youth jobs, involve youth in Civic budgets and planning. Forget imported systems. We can roll our own and show the world how to govern, by the people, for the people, as discussed in the Proposal.

As a last note, I believe that this civic function should be bundled with media, meaning that oversight and media are combined and funded. The media editor should change often, maybe month by month, but the ad section, which links to local vendors who will quote for serviced, need not be edited. It can be subbed for erros.