In Leipzig, the initiative ‘No to Payment Cards’ has been organising a solidarity voucher exchange for over a year to circumvent the harassment and discrimination of asylum seekers by the payment card system. The voucher exchange has now reached a scale that presents us with organisational problems:
- In order to organise the exchange in as coordinated a manner as possible, and thus as fairly and stress-free as possible for all those interested in exchanging, we work with a registration system. This requires a lot of communication, which currently runs via WhatsApp contact. As demand and thus enquiries are increasing, it is becoming difficult to organise the communication effort in this way.
- We constantly need more money to meet the increasing demand. This leads to an ever-growing cash deposit that has to be managed by the initiative. We would therefore like to decentralise our offer and thus the cash deposit and empower more smaller groups and initiatives to create decentralised exchange offers that are still coordinated with each other. To this end, we have developed an app idea that will serve as a platform where decentralised exchange offers can be posted and where people with payment cards who want to exchange vouchers for cash can access them in a non-hierarchical manner to search for an exchange offer.
The app is intended to be available nationwide for the many exchange initiatives. In this way, it should help to ensure that the voucher exchange, which arose spontaneously in many places as a practice of solidarity, remains possible in the long term, as long as the discriminatory practice of payment cards is not dropped by federal legislation. We have developed a basic structure for the app, which is to be implemented by two developers next year. At the event, we want to invite people to a hackspace to present the development of the app and to appeal to more people with coding skills and win them over to support the work.