Your Place Or Mine?

Our concept of money is evolving, creating immediate opportunities for brands to connect with consumers in new ways. Learn more.

Seats2meet is a service based in Amsterdam that does more than match users with paid workspaces; it also matches people to others with skills or knowledge they might need. In the latter case, the workspace traded for what Seats2meet calls "social capital," is free.This service is an example of a paradigm shift we're calling UnMoney, which questions currency and capitalism and adopts new economic systems. Your knowledge and skills, for Seats2meet, is your currency in their system, and you can trade it for a seat at someone's table.Seats2meet CEO Ronald van den Hoff says that their system is able to see hidden connections between people, and will use "serendipity" to connect them. He accelerated the launch of Seats2meet, he claims, because of the Syrian refugee crisis. "Hundreds of thousands of people will enter the workforce," said den Hoff, "they all need an education and they all need to find a job or a place to work as a freelancer. How cool would it be as a journalist to have a Syrian journalist working with you?”For den Hoff, in the future, companies will be less important than people who "will start forming temporary teams in an attempt to create social-economic value." We'll continue to see this sort of ad hoc economy layered on top of a more traditional system as people begin to see their assets and value as currency in new ways outside the traditional model.

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