Our Vancouver-based Cooperative is going pretty well. We made Bitcoin outreach the focus of our activities so far. We registered several venues to accept Bitcoin through BitPay, and are hosting events at said places through our Meet Up (
http://www.meetup.com/bitcoinvan/). The full list of business we've registered to accept bitcoins can be found on our website (under construction) at
http://vanbtc.ca/merchants. We have some affiliates already, and are quickly acquiring more; you can see what's been going on on our Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/bitcoincoop. We also buy and sell bitcoins locally ourselves.
The next step for us right now is to continuing signing up business to accept Bitcoin, and generate a wider Meet Up and Facebook following so we can speed up the outreach. We're considering various different charitable outreach initiatives and gathering the funding to do so. We developed the first Bitcoin Student Club in British Columbia of which we're aware; they're at Simon Fraser University, a pretty prominent one in Canada (
https://www.facebook.com/SFUBitcoin). We'll be holding our first presentations there, bringing guest speakers, and finding more--there's a professor there who is teaching a class about Bitcoin right now!
If you live in British Columbia, we would love to hear from you. Vancouver's Bitcoin community isn't yet as organized as in some other cities, but we're working on it and our Meet Ups are popular. If you own a Bitcoin-related business, or if you have a proposal, please do not hesitate to message us.
I live currently in México,
I have certain useful skills ( not many really ) and home-grown software that is especially designed for Cooperative charity funding, using Banking and Automation principles. Is not open-source software, not yet, ( it will be, I guess ), and is not for sale ( I could set it up for free (or for the VPS cost, or whatever ) or we could discuss.
We should discuss. It would be hard for you to come to our events to do so in person, though, given that you live in Mexico. You can still join the Co-op if you want to, however.
Despite our Meet Up following, our system is fairly informal. We do not have a centralized financial or banking program to handle our Bitcoin exchanging, expenses, or the charity fund we have not yet had the time to build. I can see how it would be useful if we did. So far our primary accomplishments have been public outreach, events, and all the venues and businesses we have or are setting up to accept Bitcoin. We are likely to expand our services in the future.
I beleive you do not understand,
but I will be to go to Vancouver or wherever, in a couple of months, for the proposal I could give, you really wouldn't need my presence.
Your system is fairly informal? mine is fully functional, and semi-professional, it has being built with what I was able to get my hands on and my head around too.
You do not need a system at all, because this system would be all you need.
Public outreach events, is all you need to make something big out of this little system.
However, I rather not share this system with a close minded group of red-light stopping excuse finder people, I would really ask you to beleive, and make this program grow, other wise, I would find other way to use whatever I can get from you to setup or partner-up with other Vancourvish-charitish kinda of institution. In the year plus in the making certain strategies have been written in several notebooks.
I'm still interested in Canada, would love to live there, some summers.