Terms of Use

Introduction

Komunitin is a software for managing community currencies. It is a major upgrade from the previous project IntegralCES which in turn was conceived as an open source alternative to the popular Community Exchange System. Komunitin is licensed under AGPL 3.0 and is distributed completely free of charge under the terms of this open source license from the source code repository.

The server komunitin.org hosts an installation of Komunitin managed by the maintainers of the software.

Objective

The purpose of the service komunitin.org is to provide virtual support for community currencies aimed at facilitating mutual aid networks and collectives that use community currencies as a tool for cooperation, the common good, ecological and economic sustainability and solidarity.

Who can use it

The service is available to all collectives that use community currencies for social purposes, for the common good, without profit motives in currency management, and with respectful behavior and a collaborative attitude towards other users and the Komunitin project. Any individual or collective deemed to be making inappropriate use of the service may be expelled.

For other uses of the service, please contact us.

Legal nature of community currencies

Community currencies managed through this service are units of measure used to record contributions and exchanges between members within their respective communities. These currencies have no intrinsic monetary value and are not redeemable for fiat national currency, legal tender, or any other form of economic value. Users acknowledge that participation in these exchange systems is voluntary and that the currencies used have no financial value.

However, users must understand that while the community currencies themselves have no monetary value, the actual economic activities, goods, and services exchanged through this system may be subject to applicable local, national, and international laws and regulations. This includes, but is not limited to, tax obligations, licensing requirements, and other legal responsibilities that may apply to the provision of goods or services. Each user is solely responsible for understanding and complying with all applicable laws and regulations in their jurisdiction and we encourage communities to facilitate compliance. Komunitin provides only the technical infrastructure for recording exchanges and assume no responsibility for users' legal compliance.

Shared maintenance

The maintenance costs of komunitin.org are divided into:

• Hosting (hardware, server administration, domains, certificates).

• Service administration (registrations, migrations, support, updates).

• Software maintenance (bug fixes, adaptation to new library versions).

• Software and service improvement (development of new features and enhancement of existing ones).

The maintenance of the service at komunitin.org is equitably covered by the various networks that use it. The contribution for maintaining the service will not be made individually, but rather each community will contribute collectively. Obviously, the different collectives will obtain these resources in the way they find most convenient.

The contribution may be made using your own community currency, provided you have external payments enabled.

Amount of Contribution per Exchange Network

We calculate the contribution corresponding to each network based on the community's size. Many different parameters can be used to measure the size of the community. For simplicity and to avoid penalizing more active communities and users, we will simply use the number of accounts per community.

The contribution will specifically be 0.1 HOUR per account per year. A network with 100 accounts will need to contribute 10 HOUR annually to the project.

Note that the HOUR is the virtual unit that measures the value of every other currency in komunitin. For reference, this may be aproximately equivalent to 1€/account.

This figure is a minimum that we hope will help covering maintenance costs initially and ensure the long-term development of the project. The goal is not to generate financial profit from the development or management of the service, but only to ensure its proper maintenance and setup a healthy and sustainable financial scheme from the begining.

Organization and Decision-Making

The organisational structure is currently very small and simple. There is a Telegram community with all currency administrators at komunitin.org where we can discuss any issue. For the technical discussions (including bug reports, improvement requests, etc) there is the issue queue at Github project.

Decisions are made currently by the development team, but the team is open to improve the structure as the project grows so all the community has voice and vote.