Nah - I’m no expert, just a voice in the crowd.
I’m happy to discuss here mostly because it serves a mutually beneficial end with the Community Building Stewardship I am doing in Birr and this affiliated Food project in the town:
(http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/blog/september-2014/innovating-in-the-field-(literally) )
Carnegie and Plunkett (moreso Carnegie) need loose metrics or at least close-to-metric data, that is - something SROI-ish that looks like its been drawn with a compass and ruler at least.
In addition, this type of loose-SROI-like system can use the participatory activities of the unMonasterian membership to fill out. This takes intelligent design, but, for example, where working with groups, you can use GNH (‘H’ is for Health/Happiness) as a guideline for the design of the Metric which can be based on questionaire instances every time a given group meets or at stages in a process (1 month, 3 months, 6 months) - are people getting healthier, happier, fitter, more productive, do they feel they have more choices etc etc. Thats one simple example.
e/SROI takes what @CommonFutures is talking about above. There are a bunch of softwares that monitor the electricity usage in the building and from what I read @Elf already knows his way round them. This service could, hypothetically, be extended to businesses in a municipality as a service whereby they in turn channel their CSR funds into unMon related projects. I once wrote a short piece for company CFOs whereby you can incentivise energy savings by channelling percentages of that saving into health programs and company-social services for employees. This requires a process of monitoring the energy usage in buildings, and with an IOT/Sensor head on your team you could do amazing and valuable work in this respect. @Alberto, your friend at Lote2 in Brussels,EU head, the older man, French-speaking, he works with exactly this kind of technology and was very interested in our conversation at the time. Perhaps if you remember his name we can revive that chat here.
In addition, there is the general lived environment, is it nicer, more amenable to the ‘good life’ and how is that measured? What is being protected in terms of environment - species, heritage sites, SAC site maintenance etc, how is it being done, how is this a saving compared to not doing what is being done? All part of this kinnd of make up.
But I’m still on the wrong track I guess, so -
@CommonFutures, you are right about the gov. position re:revenue generation, its a crux everytime going into these situations and something of a Catch22 seeing as once revenue is generated than the likelihood of your being legally pigeon-holed as some form of 101 ‘company’ increases significantly. Getting around this requires a new form of structure I reckon, and an angle to approach state/political interest while accomodating both community groups and the unMonastery model specifically may be to form some kind of municipal community-corporate identity that can work between community focussed groups and the town in which they operate…
What you are saying about alternative currency operation - this is where it gets very interesting. Making the distinction between non-profit and for-profit mean something might hinge on the use of (initially) small scale alternative currencies based on abundance. This works for everyone as long as somewhere there is a revenue angle being created to balance the thing in the eyes of state and local chamber-types.
If your colleagues want to go down the open source route, more power to them: in that case, we’ll at least look at their repo and read their README. Then, if we have the skill to reuse and improve and we like what we see, we’ll fork the code.