GNU Taler is a free software payment system that can hold any type of currency (fictitious, local, regional, crypto-currency, or fiat money). You could, for example, use Taler payments to associate a fictitious money (e.g, KUDOS) to your badge system and reward community members for their contributions, that may be exchanged for goods, premium contents, etc., using micro-payments.
Taler is currently undergoing compliance test with Swiss Francs (CHF) and is expected to be compliant with Euro (EUR) by next year. NGI TALER is a European consortium dedicated to bringing TALER payments in EUR to the Eurozone. The consortium proposes TALER Open Calls for free software developers willing to implement payments with GNU Taler in various situations.
As heavy Discourse users in Europe, we would be very happy to see one or more developers applying to these open calls to implement a discourse-taler plugin that would enable Merchant integration with Discourse. There are various ways to approach the problem, but it would make more sense to embrace a collaborative strategy to create composable plugins, for example:
discourse-taler-commonto support common RESTful JSON API functionality;discourse-taler-merchantto provide Merchant to Wallet APIdiscourse-taler-shopto provide Merchant to Discourse UI (i.e., implement shopping functionality for Discourse)discourse-solidusanddiscourse-solidus-talerwould be especially welcome, to integrate Solidus with Discourse, and add Taler payments to Solidus.
discourse-taler-donationsto provide badges-based rewards for members,- etc.
The TALER Open Calls range from 5000 € (USD 5400+) up to 50,000 € (USD 54,000) and have deadlines for proposals every two months. Next deadline is 2024-06-01T10:00:00Z. See TALER Open Calls Helpdesk for more information.
I encourage discussion and coordination here, although open calls respondents and grantees should use the TALER Integration Community Hub for support responding to the open calls and integrating Taler with Discourse.
