SLATE is an extremely simple tool to allow anyone to create community currencies of arbitrary type. Such community currencies circulate within identifiable communities (or networks, or common bonds by any other name) and are stewarded by their creators and any others with whom they choose to share that responsibility.
Such community currencies may take a number of forms, at this stage all more or less money-like, including:
SLATE also enables prospective users to create virtual spaces in which they can
There may be many mechanisms by which the circulation of such currencies can be stimulated and sustained, but that is a large area for exploration and beyond the scope of this page.
These simple scalar values fall into two main categories:
Each such currency serves a community, network or common bond of some sort. There is no way to predict how many might be created, how large or small such communities might be, where and how they might be positioned or located, or how they might be used. There is also no reason to place unnecessary restrictions on how they might be applied (although part of their stewards' role is to take any necessary steps to suspend or withdraw access in the case of any illegal activities being reported). In the case of the first type listed above, this should be regarded as an accounting tool and therefore subject to the normal requirements of disclosure for tax assessments - a responsibility lying with the agent (whether a human, a business or some other type of organization) rather than with the stewards. The essential policies can be found within The LETSystem Design Manual, the ancestor of the greatly expanded open money.
Although, once sufficiently complete, SLATE could be used for real world applications, in the shorter term its use is likely to be restricted to modelling, simulation, experimentation, participatory "games" at various scales (with the option to combine human and robotic agents) and much else within a safe "virtual space".
SLATE began life as a temporary system to allow certain higher-priority tasks to be undertaken while NESTS is still being developed (its specification being extremely fluid at this stage). For this reason, the names used to identify entities in SLATE were from the start designed to be compatible with those of NESTS. When work began on SLATE it was intended to be a much simpler and more easily implemented stopgap pending completion of the more ambitious (at the time) NESTS, but since then much has changed. Priorities have since shifted, new design options have been assessed and adopted, and SLATE has evolved into an embryonic stage of a re-architected NESTS rather than a functionally-reduced alternative.
When looking for a convenient acronym, the common expression "just put it on the slate" suggested this as starting point. It is indeed a "simple ledger application" and it was defintely intended as a "temporary expedient" pending a return to work on NESTS. The names "SLATE" then fell out naturally.
Given the amount that has been learnt during the development of SLATE and the influence it has had on the re-design of NESTS, it is no longer clear whether these are really still two separate projects or how the two names might be used in future. At this point it seems likely that they will indeed merge into a single project, with NESTS referring to the unconstrained and far more abitious version intended to support a growing range of open measure applications while SLATE will refer to a restricted subset implementing more traditional open money approaches.