Almost a year has passed since we last did a call-out for testing (/fairmarket-alpha-testing/) and a lot has changed with FairMarket. First we had internal problems because the first small FairMarket devteam disbanded and it was months until in autumn a new one came into being; now more participative and stronger for the challenges at hand: to became a crucial resource in the FairCoop ecosystem. After a lot of work in the last months, the beta is nearly here and scheduled for March 6, Faircoin’s second birthday, and which is when you will actually be able to buy and sell products using Fairmarket:
The main development has been the linking of the the odoo modules that make up its ERP core with an Electrum-Fair client, which gives it true Faircoin processing abilities. This is provided by a new module, written by FairMarket developer extraordinaire Santi, integrating odoo(https://www.odoo.com/) with electrum-fair, and which can show faircoin addresses as QR codes, so that you can make your payments from mobile devices, and so that we can start to extract transaction fees and payment verification. Another part is multi-currencies, although a lot of work has been done in this area. This has already been developed in similar software such as Wezer, by French association Valeureux (https://www.valeureux.org/blog/wezer-2/), and the new IntegralCES API (https://www.drupal.org/project/ices), which already allows integration with Coopfunding and with administration software developed by the Catalan Integral Cooperative (https://github.com/CICIC). The short term gain, apart from a promising API call which will one day allow people to use the FairMarket to buy things using their Catalan Ecos or in another integralCES run currency, is that we also realised we find ourselves within a true and burgeoning ecology of alternate finance, accounting administration, and money-related projects, where FairMarket is a key part of the ecosystem that is gradually becoming its own economy.
Using this tool, any individual or collective can sign up and have the equivalent of PayPal and Amazon, but without the high fees and the privately run Euro-centred corporations, plus the ability for these to follow a cooperative and alternative logic to that of “sell sell sell”, or “money talks” philosophies.
So we’d like to ask you to register and log in at https://market.fair.coop/ – if you have done so already it should remember your existing usernames, you can let us know if you need any help, but when you log in, please fill in an issue in the forum area: https://market.fair.coop/forum/ and write about any errors or issues you have found. You can open your shop in the FairMarket and prepare your new place on the net for selling your products and services before the beta launch.
Please tell us if you find it clunky, hard to use or just plain ugly, or if you find an error of any kind, or saw some internal error messages that weren’t very clear, or clicked something that didn’t take you where you expected. Also you are welcome to test the site as a “customer” and just look at the process for buying something. In any case, please take into account that the checkout process will be disabled until the launch.
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