Red Ink is an open source social-financial web-service that enables people to share, aggregate, analyze, visualize and publish their financial transactions as individuals and ad-hoc groups.

Virtual and geographic communities of financial data sharers can form on Red Ink to create new sources of information for self-knowledge and understanding of complex personal, community, economic, environmental, and civic concerns and how to better coordinate their solutions.

RedInk expands personal finance tools, like Mint.com, into financial network tools for community based data sharing. Consumer analytics is nothing new: banks, businesses and governments use these techniques frequently and to powerful ends. But, we as individuals and as communities, social groups, political groups, journalists, NGOs, we the public are largely disenfranchised from accessing and analyzing the same information. There are many useful analytical techniques that could be produced from the data for individual and community knowledge. The crux is finding questions so relevant or socially meaningful that they speak past people's inabitions towards sharing their financial information. Questions of local consumption, green consumption, mortgage exploitation, and carbon footprint reduction come to mind. Issues that need to be framed in a larger community context in order to understand anything quantifiable about the effect of our behavior on solving the problem.