A creative currency is a form of Community Currency designed specifically for collaborative work in the creative industries. It is tuned for digital and remote work where media, code, and stories can be shared and remixed online.
The concept of a creative currency was developed independently by Gilson Schwartz and by the author of this wiki as a way to support creative workers and teams who want to collaborate without waiting for traditional funding.
# Purpose Creative currency addresses a common problem in creative work: many projects need a lot of contribution before any money appears, or sometimes without money appearing at all. Traditional community currencies tend to focus on local services and everyday chores. Creative currency shifts the focus to collaborative media projects and experiments, games and interactive stories, design, writing and digital art, and remote, cross-border creative teams. The aim is to make collaboration visible and valued without pretending the currency is a full replacement for cash.
# Creative Industries Focus Creative currency is built around how creative industries actually work. Typical situations include a small team making an indie film, web series or podcast, a distributed group building a game or prototype together, a loose collective creating zines, comics, soundtracks or toolkits, and a class or studio group working on shared projects over a term. In these cases contributions are often drafts, edits and feedback, assets, scenes, tracks and levels, code commits, tools and infrastructure, and facilitation, mentoring and project care. Creative currency gives these contributions a shared language and record.
# Digital And Remote Friendly Creative currency assumes that most work and output are digital. Work is stored in repos, drives and shared folders; collaboration happens in chat, video calls and shared documents; and finished work can be published and remixed on the internet. Because of this, the ledger of contributions can be a wiki, a git log or a small web app. Remote collaborators can participate on equal footing with local ones. Raspberry Pi or other home lab machines can host ledgers and tools as part of a Federated Guide or class workbook.
# Mechanism Creative currency is a pattern, not a single implementation. Common elements include a way to register that a contribution has happened (for example a scene, design, commit or edit), a way to allocate creative currency units to that contribution (decided by the group or by simple agreed rules), a way to view history and current balances for people and projects, and a way to link units to specific artefacts, releases or milestones.
The mechanism can be low tech using a shared spreadsheet or federated wiki. It can also be integrated with project tools through lightweight scripts and APIs. The important part is that it reflects the messy, iterative shape of creative work, not just final deliverables.
# Ethos Creative currency carries an ethos that distinguishes it from pure accounting systems. Core values include collaboration over competition, recognition over extraction, transparency over secrecy, and learning over judgement. The ethos shapes questions like who can issue new units, how disagreements about credit are handled, and how easy it is to acknowledge invisible work such as moderation and support. The ethos is the culture of the currency, not just a note in the documentation.
It is important to note that this ethos sits above, but still informs, the governance structure of the conference; it is more than a soft culture narrative and more than an oversimplified set of governance agreements. As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast, but equally, kind words without structure are meaningless. As Jo Freeman showed in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, when we refuse to formalise structure we don’t get freedom, we just get unaccountable power. Culture and kind words without structure quickly become meaningless.
# Branding And Story A creative currency works better when it has a clear identity and story. Branding choices include a name that fits the project, such as Voz as voice in a Hitchhiker galaxy, simple icons, colours or sigils that can appear on profiles, badges and passports, and a tone of voice that fits the scene, whether playful, serious, experimental or activist. The story answers questions like what one unit of this currency represents, whether people are sharing credits, stamps, shards or slices, and whether they are tracking a journey, a score or a choir of voices. The story reminds participants that the currency is a tool for shared making, not a ranking of personal worth.
# Relationship To Money Creative currency sits alongside money rather than replacing it. Units are not sold as speculative assets. Units are not promised as direct payment for rent or basic needs. Units can inform later money splits but do not guarantee them. A simple framing is that money helps answer how we survive, while creative currency helps answer who made this possible and how. If a project later earns income, a creative currency ledger can be used as one input to revenue sharing discussions, but the ledger itself is not cash.
# Use In Collaborative Work In practical terms a creative currency can be used to track contributions across a long running project, to make invisible work such as editing, facilitation and mentoring visible, to support credit lists and acknowledgements in releases, to provide a starting point for future revenue or opportunity sharing, and to help teachers and mentors see patterns of participation without grading the art itself. The currency becomes a shared memory of the project and a map of who held it together.
# Examples And Patterns Creative currency can appear in many small concrete forms. Examples include a studio or class project where students log contributions over weeks and see a shared ledger, Passport stamps in a Hitchhiker Passport or Hitchhiker Guide that record creative roles, tales and missions, a remote art collective using a federated wiki and Raspberry Pi host to track time, scenes and edits, and an open source creative tool where contributors earn symbolic shares of voice in the roadmap and documentation. Each implementation will have its own name, visuals and rules, but the pattern is the same.
# Relation To Voz Voz is a child friendly example of a creative currency. Voz emphasises acts of help and creative play rather than transactions, reputation, titles and access to new creative spaces, and voice in choosing projects and missions rather than ownership of assets. This shows how the same creative currency idea can be tuned for young players inside Roblox and linked to external journals and class workbooks through a Federated Guide.
# Open Questions Design questions that remain open for creative currencies include how to avoid turning every creative act into a metric while still offering recognition, how to protect privacy and safety especially for children and vulnerable collaborators, how to let people leave a project while keeping a fair trace of their contribution, and how different creative currencies might interoperate across communities without losing their local character. These questions can be explored experimentally in living projects rather than answered only in theory.