It handles the main objections business raises at LETSystems and other open community systems, by ensuring that the money is good. In a cw system, ALL the money in circulation is business backed, issued ONLY by them, when they make their opening donations. This direct accountability also makes it realistic for people to exchange conventional $ for cw$, as they know where cw$ are accepted.

A community way program pays its way by operating (briefly) something like a commercial "barter" net - levying a % fee when money moves. The commercial barter organizations do it as a matter of course - it's their primary revenue source.

Community way temporarily applies a 10% levy (in cw$) only to contributions (in cw$) made by businesses donating to community projects and causes. This practice can for a while be considered justified - as a fee for raising charitable funds that would not otherwise have been available. This justification will however quickly lose substance, and in any case become impractical as donors and beneficiaries progressively realise how they can arrange such donations without the assistance of the ldi, much as cash donations are raised without the banks' assistance or any levy by them.

The 10% levy by the ldi program on contributions by business should certainly be dropped by the time the total community way donations throughout that entire ldi region have amounted to cw$1 per person living in that region. Most ldi regions will have population of a million or more, and hence can project budgets based on revenues of over $100,000.

Community way will pay for cc smarts cards - initial costs will be us$200/mo to cc developers, in sets of 5 - (with five more to follow when we have managed to reduce the wholesale costs, and can start shipping at us$100/mo). However, an equipment cost of us$200 per business can be easily carried if the business is donating over cw$2,000, and the ldi gets 10%.

An ldi can introduce and run community way without cards, by accounts or paper bills - but then all the benefits to the businesses lie in the cw and other programs themselves - LETSystems and business to business networks. While these benefits should be perfectly sufficient, the initial condition is that the business has no experience of them, indeed it is one purpose of community way to show them just that.

If however the cw starts smart, the technology itself offers the businesses further benefits. The cards can support loyalty programs exclusive to a single business, or (soon) run monthly accounts for regular customers. Hence they may buy a mo themselves (or contribute in cw to have one provided) for those reasons too.