Time Banking and Open Learning

As I continue to puzzle over the economic impact of all this sharing, I'm keeping an eye out for solutions that could make it more workable. One of the solutions I've come across is Time Banking. In a nutshell, Time Banking is simply a way to barter time, hour for hour. I tutor you in math for an hour, you spend an hour looking over my most recent paper for style and grammar errors. It can even be used to buy goods, how does twenty minutes of work for a bushel of bananas sound? Incorporating an economic tool like this into some of the open resources we looked at in chapter 5 would provide an incentive system and a method to keep it viable.

Since I'm getting off the topic, here, I'll refocus on the tools:
-MIT's Open Course Ware (OCW) - They provide everything that you need for the course, from the syllabus to videos of the lectures. Really the only things lacking here are interactivity and the ability to make the course "count" somehow.
-Opensource Opencourseware Prototyping System - this is mainly a way to wikify translation of OCW into Chinese. The website calls for volunteers to simply transcribe the material in English, so even those who don't speak Chinese can help. I'd like to see this expand into other languages as well, and in the unlikely event that the great and mighty English speaking world has something to learn from anyone else, it would be nice to see some things translated into English as well.
-Peer to Peer University - This was by far the most interesting idea in the chapter, and I intend to sign up for at least one course to see what it's like on the inside. The name implies that that it's a bunch of interested people getting together on a common topic to try to figure something out, but the description in the site itself describes something more hierarchical than that.

To go back to the Time Banking idea, it would be great if a way could be devised for people to volunteer in their community as a way to repay the system for its openness. Then the benefit spreads to everyone, even those not directly participating.