January 2013 SCANZ 3rd nature brought together artists and technologists together artists with members of the Parihaka community
2015 Cyclone Pam devastates Vanuatu - Furtherarts working as official communicators on documentation
2015 - 2016 Cascade workshops running in Brighton
December 2015. Artists involved in creative actions connected at the COP21demonstrations in Paris
2016 Artists working with Sandy Sur and the Leweton Community
2017 Trans Art Alliance initiated by Tracey Benson and Tommy Dick (Further Arts)
June 2017 333 euros of Faircoin brought for the project
July 2017 SCANZ Canberra involved a water ceremony connection across the waters with Vanuatu, Chartres France, America and the UK.
September 2017 Performance ritual at the Crawick Multiverse connecting collaborators in Austrailia, America and Vanuatu.
October 2017 The Tualip tribe in N West America seed funding to hold a creative exchange on sharing cultural forms that also creates real value. This funded Furtherarts to interview communities still using shell money.
Autumn 2017 Ambae evacuation. Furtherarts documentation and communication. Shelley Darling setting up the Water Bearers for clean water filter systems to Vanuatu.
Early 2018 Transartalliance formalised.
This timeline of events has inspired this network of collaborators and the ambitious ideas for a value creating system that enables island communities to operate during the transition of the next decades with their indigenous sovereignty strengthened
Some of Tom's other ideas that might be relevant.
Other connections between non-cash customary currencies and cryptocurrencies in the Pacific
There is currently a transnational project to nominate Yapese stone money (or disc money as it is also known) to be inscribed as a World Heritage Site. The Yapese Disk Money Regional Sites nomination involved two countries, Republic of Palau and Federated States od Micronesia. In Palau two sites namely Uet el Daob ma Uet el Beluu and Chelechol ra Orrak (in a Rock Island in Airai State) was where the oval/round disk money were quarried by the Yapese before they were transported back to Yap. In Yap State two sites namely Mangyol Stone Money Bank and O'Keefe Island have been nominated. Yapese people travelled across the 400 km of open water to Palau limestone Rock Islands where they quarried their megalithic disk money. The Yapese earned the right to quarry their disks money by bartering or exchanging exotic materials and forming alliances with villages in Palau with rights to particular Rock Islands.
At this hyperlink the reader can view a video about Pacific Island Stone Money from Yap in Micronesia and the connections to cryptocurrency. And more info about the same idea is at this link. Note that the media at these links have been created by people who are already invested in bitcoin and so they should be viewed critically.
Hitnet - a possible link for Cascade in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia
As well as his work with Further Arts in Vanuatu, Tom works in Australia with Hitnet, an innovative Australian ‘Communication for Development’ company that builds the smart digital ecosystems needed to reach and engage the most marginalised of people. Hitnet empowers marginalised communities by co-creating culturally rich information and delivering it across an integrated digital platform: a network of around 100 touchscreen kiosks located in remote Indigenous communities across Australia. Check out the Hitnet platform on this link. The team at Hitnet:
The Hitnet Community Hubs are part of a broader digital eco-system where new technologies empower consumers to make smarter choices about their health, and so ‘nudging’ healthy behaviours. For several years now, Hitnet has been shaping an idea which shares many synergies with the Cascade concept. Fundamentally the Hitnet "Content Marketplace" as it was first coined by the CEO, Julie Gibson, would be a way for local producers of media content to connect with consumers of media and thereby receive a fee or royalty for the media they produce. Essentially a facility for them "to produce content, upload to the Content Marketplace, licence their work, receive royalties and usage reporting".
Field Ready - blockchain for disaster response?
Building on our work in "disaster response" - with Cyclone Pam and the Ambae evacuation - Further Arts is exploring a project to embed/inscribe local traditional and customary wisdom and practice into contemporary disaster response mechanisms. In collaboration with the National Disaster Management Office we are working with an innovative organisation called Field Ready - an organisation focused on solving "big challenges with local manufacturing. We do this by working in emergencies and reconstruction, using a range of technologies and engaging people in new ways. The impact of this is more people helped - faster, cheaper and better."