CES Australia is the Australian section of the global Community Exchange System.
Decentralising for resilience
The CES started functioning in 2003 and in the years following many existing Australian LETS groups joined CES in order to take advantage of the online tools it provided and to be part of the global network of alternative trading exchanges that it had become.
From the start CES was highly centralised with hundreds of exchange groups hosted on a single server. In order to make the system more resilient CES decided to set up a separate server in Australia to host the Australian LETS community.
Sharing the knowledge & responsibility
All CES admin and maintenance falls on Tim Jenkins. By training up an Australian CES team Tim has some support, and the system will no longer be reliant on a single programmer. Tim will still be the head honcho – but the Australian team will be able to take care of the basics for Australian groups.
Aiming to work with other systems in the future
CES is currently used by hundreds of groups around the world, but it is not the only software being used by community trading groups. Software such as cForge and Cyclos are being taken up by groups in Europe, South America, and beyond. So Tim has taken this opportunity to restructure the CES to allow for the possibility of connecting up with groups that use different types of software.