Gabriel Shalom is a young filmmaker who just completed a film called The Future of Money [2]. It features interviews with young social entrepreneurs who are attempting to create networks like Flattr [3] and Giftflow [4] where social currency can replace the paper kind. Many participants were interviewed over Skype, sitting in their bedrooms, and the whole thing was thrown together with $6,000 raised from a large group of donors.

"There's this whole parallel economy based on trust, transparency, and open data"--phenomena like couchsurfing, coworking, community gardens, and hackerspaces, says Shalom. He's one in a horde of innovators and hackers in Barcelona for the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival [5] on the Future of Learning, Freedom and the Web--from David Wiley [6], one of the godfathers of open educational content, to Joi Ito [7] of Creative Commons, and Mitchell Baker [8], Mozilla's chief lizard wrangler. I'm here documenting it this week as a follow-up to my book DIY U [9].

For Shalom, openness about who you are is linked to getting what you want. "What we're looking at creating are data nudist colonies: whole groups of people being transparent and attaining a new level of happiness and comfort," he says. "If you are open about what you have, what you need, what you can do, who you know, you start to generate a kind of digital profile that is very rich in potential value."

Rather than allow a company like Facebook to make billions by monetizing our identity and our social graph, citizens of the networked utopia should be able to benefit from these assets directly. It's a heady idea and likely to appeal to a lot of Millennials who are richer in friends, time, and passion than in cash.