I’m a scientist, you know. Well, I’m not a mathematician or physicist, going crazy about equations and theorems. In fact, I’m a computer scientist, so I tend to see the world through models. In computers, you know it’s impossible to reproduce reality as it is. First, as a scientist you humbly know that it’s impossible because our perception is too limited to get a grasp on it. But also because computers are even more limited in the way they can represent the world. In a computer, there is no such thing as infinity or continuity. Computers are finite and discrete. So every programming project starts with thinking about a model to represent the local problem at hand (finitely) in a way that computers can understand and work with (discretely). The result of this process might not be ideal, but it doesn’t need to be. It just has to be good enough. And if it’s not, then we develop new tools and technologies to increase the complexity of our models and get them closer and closer to reality, even though we know that we will never get there. In mathematics, we call that an asymptotic trend.

Now of course there can be a lot of different models to represent the same system, the idea being to map concepts from the system onto concepts from your model, apply the rules inside your model, and extrapolate what is happening in the system based on that.

Now let’s say the global financial system is a closed physical bubble. In this bubble, there is matter and there is energy. Let’s say matter is everything we produce or extract, be it services, goods, food, etc. Then like in every physical system, there are a lot of different sorts of energy.

There’s kinetic energy, energy created by mass in movement. Kinetic energy is progress, be it social, technical, that is everything that makes our lives easier and buys us some time to do more stuff.

There’s mechanical energy, created by forces. Mechanical energy is work.

There’s potential energy of gravity, energy accumulated by a mass that lifts up. Potential energy of gravity is global intelligence, understanding of the world around us.

There’s electric energy, that needs wires, connections to flow. Electric energy is the social connections between people.

There’s magnetic energy, created when magnetic fields move around one another, especially electromagnetic fields created by the flow of electric energy. Magnetic energy is happiness, well-being.

There’s chemical energy, stored and contained within matter, released by chemical reactions with matter and other forms of energy involved. Chemical energy is innovation.

And last but not least, there’s thermal energy, heat, that you can inject into a system to increase its entropy. Heat is money.

Now given this mapping, there is one fundamental rule to remember about a closed physical system: nothing’s lost, nothing’s created, everything’s transformed. You can turn energy into matter and vice-versa, which also means that you can tranform one kind of energy into another.

So what does the current financial system look like? Globalization is a very complex system and since we were not able to handle this complexity, we created a model to represent it, to approximate it. Now I don’t pretend to be an economist, but the way I see it, this model is very simplistic: people work to turn services and goods into money, and that money is supposed to create progress. In terms of our model, this can be translated like this: we combine matter and work to produce heat, that is supposed to make us move forward.

Now I see several problems with that. First, it looks a lot like what an old steam engine does, a very old-school way to move, so “first-industrial-revolution”. Second, it’s not efficient at all, because a very important part of the heat we produce is lost into the atmosphere and in friction. And last but not least, I used “supposed to” on purpose: what’s the point in moving forward when it’s perfectly warm right where we are?

But wait a second! Where are people in my model? Well, the way I see it, people are the complex machines (remember, it’s a model!) that accelerate the transformation of matter into energy, of one sort of energy into another one, beyond what would happen if the whole system was left alone. People are colliding molecules, power plants, engines, stars. But we are also parts of the whole system, which means we can’t evade the fundamental rule of conservation: we need matter and energy for our own consumption in order to do what needs to be done. In other words, only a fraction of what comes in actually goes out. Otherwise we would be a 100% efficient engine, the myth of perpetual movement.

And in my humble opinion, that is exactly what we are pursuing in vain, which explains why our financial system tends to neglect people so much, leave them out of the equation.

Now don’t you think this model is a little too approximative? I think it is. And as a scientist, when my model fails, I analyze why it failed and I use that to build a more complex model that is closer to the real system. What this means is that the next system will have flaws, it might create other crises, but it should hold better and by the time it fails, we will have gone further, we will understand our world better, we will have progressed.

Now what will the next model look like? Well, obviously it should stop neglecting all those different forms of energy. Happiness, progress, social connections, innovation, they should all become integral parts of the equation, they should even be favored over the highly inefficient and misleading thermal energy. And we should all remember, that since nothing’s created and nothing’s lost, if we steal something on one hand, sooner or later, we’ll have to give it back. And if we artificially create energy where it doesn’t exist, the equation will balance itself and evacuate that surplus, sometimes violently.

Now this is just my own personal, humble and limited understanding and reflexion. I’d be very curious to know what YOU think. Where are the flaws in my model? Do you see examples of where the mapping works or doesn’t work? What should be the main rules of the next model?

We have not given a lot of news lately. In fact, after we submitted our application for ImpulCera, we decided to wait and not be carried away. One can be convinced to have the best idea ever, it’s always a good thing to step back for a while. We didn’t do that for Seedcamp with TagSpot, and when the result came in, it was like a penalty.

This time, we were not carried away, and the jury just came back: we’re ON! Next step: we’ll meet people from SAW-B next Friday to know more about the Impulcera process.

If I got it right, the next step will be to prepare a file for the “Feasability Grant” jury. And they will give this grant based on 3 criteria being entrepreneurship qualities of the team (that’s us!), innovation and social impact of our project.

The easiest part will be innovation. betRway is innovative on at least 3 very distinct aspects. First on our objective, that is to define and demonstrate the efficiency of a new economic system that puts at the same level all the forms of energy that you can inject into or get return from a business, be it financial, work, skills, experience, etc. Then on the means: ease, clarify and accelerate information exchange and collaboration between contributors and entrepreneurs thanks to the Internet. Finally on our values, since innovation and progress will underlie the objectives of all the projects promoted on betRway. Now how is that not innovation everywhere?

Entrepreneurship qualities of our team will be harder to demonstrate with sound logical arguments. They will have to see that in us.

About the social impact of the project, it all depends on what you mean by “social” and “impact”. Our primary objective is the creation of a new investment model, and our bet is that this economic system will encourage people to create innovative companies that put human beings at the center of their concerns. From that point of view, the biggest social impact will probably be the most indirect and the toughest to evaluate with numbers. On the other hand, “social” also means “community”, “participative”, “collaborative”. And by creating a real social network around contributors and entrepreneurs, this social impact will be more obvious. In addition to that, considering the fact that many promising startup projects never see the light of day, and that tens if not hundreds of job opportunities are then killed in the egg because of a missing investment alternative, our social impact gets closer to the definition we all have in mind. But I think what really matters to me is the opportunity to raise consciences, to insufflate a new motivation into all the participants of our platform, a desire to learn, to progress, to evolve, to understand, to take risks, to take matters into our own hands… instead of being satisfied with a choice between possession and suffering.

So there we are. A first step is behind us, and if we get that “Feasibility Grant”, we will be able to devote ourselves to finding answer to the numerous questions still on hold:

• How can betRway map itself onto Belgian law?
• How will the investment and retribution system work, so that it remains both simple AND fair?
• How to communicate with potential entrepreneurs and contributors in order to bootstrap the network and make it grow in a balanced and controlled fashion?
• How to set up a technical solution that is both flexible, performant, easy to use and extensible to ease and encourage collaboration?

As you can see, the “what” is not really a problem at this stage. The feasibility study will make it possible for us to clarify the “how to”, and we hope that many of you will be involved in this process.

I can’t wait for next Friday.

Others think (like we do) that the system is broken beyond repair and that it is time to rethink the way our economy works. In my humble opinion, we can’t rely on banks or even the government to initiate this movement. We have to innovate, stop undergoing the crisis and consider it as an amazing alternative to build something better, a new economy. And it’s not only an idealistic dream anymore: smart growth, social economy, more and more people are thinking about what values and principles could become the foundation of a fairer economy.

As you may know if you’ve read our objective, we would also like to create a new economy and we believe that progress and innovation should be at its heart because they have led us this far, have created enormous opportunity for employment, education, and they have the potential to buy us some time to focus on real-life concerns like hunger, diseases, environment and so on.

1. The finality of the project must be to serve the collectivity or the members, rather than to make profits
2. The project must be autonomously managed, outside of the frame of public or traditional private companies
3. The decision process must be democratic
4. Individuals and work must be favored over capital and revenue sharing

As you can see, these criterias have numerous similarities with our values. In fact, our initiative looks a lot like theirs, except we’re adding the notion of a web-based marketplace and the concept of collective micro-investment (or “crowdfunding” as they call it). So we will present a file for this grant, even though our project is somehow atypical since we propose the creation of a meta-structure to facilitate enterprise creation. But all this notion of social economy resonates too much with our vision, and we cannot let this go. And more importantly, the support of their structure can be a great asset to set up ours faster, to add some credit to it, and this grant would allow us to free up some time to work on it 100%.

For the record, since we had to think in French to fill in our application form, et since we notived that some of our supporters would rather use Moliere’s language, we decided to translate this blog in 2 languages and to publish all our content in both English and French. Why keep English? you might ask. Well, simply because we allow ourselves to dream of the globalization of our initiative, and because communicating in a language understandable by most people (no, I won’t learn Chinese) is a form of transparency. So French-speaking friends, let’s hear your comments.

But once we’ve done that, we’re gonna need something else: a structure. We already have a few ideas about the technical platform, about how the system could work in terms of investment. But whether we like it or not, all those ideas will have to fit in Belgium laws. And of course it’s a creative challenge because the concept is so different from what most companies look like.

And a structure is important too because there is no way sponsors will contribute money into the projects until they completely sure everything is clean and we are not some sort of swindlers.

So this post is our first request for collaboration: we need legal advice. We need someone to know what are our legal options, someone to help us challenge our ideas. So if you want to help, if you are a Belgian company lawyer or if you know one, if you have experience and knowledge about these matters, please leave a comment and let’s talk about it.

The next step was to find a name, because even though it doesn’t seem that important, it’s still necessary to identify many things related to a project: email addresses, a website, package names in the code, and so on. And finding a name is hard nowadays: it has to be easy to remember, convey a message, it must sound good but more importantly, the .com domain should be available. But with domain parking rotting the whole place, I was missing ideas. Until I realized the power of this “better way” concept. betterway.com was taken, so I added a little bit of Web 2.0 lingua in there and BOOM! betrway.com

After that, I needed to find a quick and generic way to implement the concept. I wanted to avoid waiting weeks or months for a custom app to be ready. I’ve done that before, and it’s frutstrating. I figured the main thing we needed was a way to rapidly create communication channels for individual projects. The most common form of communication channel is a blog, so Eric pointed me to Wordpress Multi-Users as a way to create one blog for each project, with a common user base. And since we both run our personal blogs on Wordpress, it was rather easy.

So that’s where real things happen now: welcome to betrway.com, the next-generation marketplace for software startups and collective investments. Now there IS a betrway!