American development economist focusing on currency innovation in East Africa. Founder of Grassroots Economics and the Commitment Pooling Protocol, drawing on the Mweria rotating labor tradition of coastal Kenya. Creator of the PATH License (Public Awareness and Transparent Heritage) and developer of CIC (Community Inclusion Currencies).
Contribution
Ruddick’s work demonstrates that community currencies can function as coordination infrastructure in low-income economies where national currency is scarce. The Grassroots Economics Foundation, operating in Kenya, has deployed community currencies across multiple communities, providing a medium of exchange that keeps value circulating locally rather than draining to urban centers.
His Commitment Pooling protocol formalizes the logic of mutual obligation that underlies traditional systems like Mweria. Where conventional currencies represent claims on abstract value, commitment pools represent claims on specific productive capacity within a defined community. The protocol has popularized a concrete mechanism for the kind of place-based economic coordination that bioregional economics requires.
Digital library
Related pages
- Mweria
- Curation, valuation, limitation, exchange
- Commitment pool
- Grassroots Economics
- Elinor Ostrom
- Grassroots Economics
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Enriched August 2027 from the Roam Research graph (MichaelHaupt): biographical detail, CIC and PATH License, digital library PDFs added.