Board Election Coming Up.

We have 4 self-nominations for the upcoming election thus far. View their candidate statements here.

Members can also self-nominate at the Special Meeting to Elect Directors which will be held at 7:30 on Tuesday, August 5 at the Social Justice Center Conference Room, 1202 Williamson St.. Members interested in declaring their candidacy are encouraged to post a candidate statement here at madisonhours.org.

You must be a current member to be a board member or to vote. Anyone can join or renew their membership at the beginning of the Special Meeting.

All 5 seats are open. The top 3 vote getters will get 2 year terms and the others 1 year terms. This will put us back on the rotation called for in our by-laws. If we don't have a 5th candidate, the Board may elect to appoint a member to the 5th seat.

In addition to the regular distribution of proceeds collected at our pancake breakfast fundraisers, we will also pay the co-hosting organization one Madison Hour for each volunteer hour performed with a maximum of 12 being paid for any one breakfast.

This policy was approved by the Board July 1, 2008 with the condition that it apply retroactively to June 8, 2008.

Hello , I would like to be the pivotal point with generating new members to the Madison Hours cooperative , based on my volunteer service with a local community center, which is currently associated with the Dane Co. Time Bank. Question; Would there be objections towards initiating some members of new and growing local Hispanic business community to participate with this idea?, and possibly individuals whom use the community service like the food pantry. would their participation be welcomed also? email me ;; crowmessenger57@yahoo.com personally I see good possibilities. Thank you. jhn_

We received this in our Madison Hours email and wanted to share the concept. This is a new system that uses potential energy as a non-inflationary store of value.

You may be interested to learn about Kilowatt Cards - gift cards that pay for 10 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity in any residential utility account, anywhere in the world. They demonstrate fixed-value paper. Electric utilities don't accept them - we do, thorough www.kilowattcards.com - and then send payments directly to the power companies, at the rate they normally charge their residential customers for that exact amount of electricity (including taxes and fees).

I'm curious about how people plan to spend their economic stimulus check. Of course, I'm ignoring the larger question of whether this is good policy or not...

My plan is to put half towards energy efficiency improvements on my home and the other half on my mortgage.

Your thoughts?

As our economy continues to stumble, the housing crisis deepens and our national debt skyrockets the government has decided to try to sweep it all under the rug. The Bush Administration will shut down the popular economicindicators.gov on March 1 because of "budgetary constraints."

The site, administered by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce, is widely used by academics, economists and reporters. It is invaluable towards an informed public understanding of the state of our economy. It links data from a wide variety of Government agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to allow easy access to government data. One great feature of the site is email notification when selected agencies or departments issue new reports.

On November 15, several offices and operations of the Liberty Dollar were raided by the FBI and Secret Service. The seizure warrant was issued for money laundering, wire fraud and mail fraud. The Liberty Dollar is, like Madison HOURS, an alternative currency, but unlike Madison HOURS, not a local currency.

I, for one, don't know enough about Liberty Dollars to know what role it plays in our economy, compared to federal currency or local currency. What might this action mean for local currencies like Ithaca Hours and Madison HOURS? What does the raid say about federal government?

Liberty Dollars: http://www.libertydollar.org
WikiPedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar

Thoughts? Ideas?

We plan to resume our monthly potlucks in 2008 and will post them on our calendar as we confirm locations.