Revisit:
Chapter 1: The Unraveling of Wage Based Value
Chapter 2: Revealing Civic-Labor
Chapter 3: The Structure of a Public-Sector Currency

It is one thing to imagine that people could receive credits for civic work and spend them on public goods. It is another thing to embed that logic into real municipal institutions, with real capacity limits, real political oversight, real staff turnover, and real budgets in question. A civic currency is a proposed public institution, and institutions do not govern themselves. They are shaped by procedures, committees, oversight, and culture. If the goal is to understand how a civic currency backed by civic-labor works, then we have to show how it would be governed.

We need to describe in detail how a civic currency could operate in practice within a city, what governance structures it would require, what decisions those structures would make, what metrics they should monitor, and how the system could adapt over time. 

Before diving into governance, I want to be precise about what this proposed currency is and what it is not. A civic currency is not a second kind of money that floats in markets. It is not meant to be traded on exchanges, speculated on, hoarded as an asset, or used to pay rent or buy groceries. 

A civic currency is an accounting system for a specific domain of activity that logs publicly recognized contributions to the common good. When someone tutors a child at a public library or coaches a youth sports league, they are performing civic-labor. At present, that labor is either unpaid or poorly compensated, and in either case, it does not register in the way we track economic life. A civic currency simply declares that these contributions count, and we will record and recognize them.

That recognition takes the form of credits. Those credits are earned by doing approved tasks for accredited issuers, and they can later be redeemed for access to public goods offered by accredited redeemers. A person might earn credits tutoring at the library and spend them on transit passes, swimming lessons for their child, a museum membership, a community college course, or to supplement the cost for childcare services. The currency should not substitute for a living wage, but it should build a parallel channel of reciprocity that recognizes a different class of work.

Crucially, these credits should be non-transferable. They should attach to the person who earned them and should not be sold or gifted away. Doing this avoids turning the civic currency into an object of speculation, or a way for the already wealthy to purchase participation on the backs of others. Earning a civic credit represents something meaningful.

It also means that a credits circulation is not about market exchange but about how credits move across institutions as they are issued and redeemed.

All of this only works if there is a governance layer that decides what counts as civic labor, who is allowed to issue and redeem credits, how credits are valued, and how to keep the system from being captured or overwhelmed. 

Introducing the Players

To see how governance might function in a real setting, let's imagine a mid-sized city that is considering running a pilot. The city has a public library system, a parks and recreation department, a transit agency, a community college, several cultural institutions, a network of nonprofits, and a city hall with legal, budgeting, and IT capacities. This is the civic stack into which any new system must be inserted.

Within that stack, the first group of key players are the issuers.  These are institutions that can offer opportunities to execute on civic work, and verify that civic work has been done. Libraries, for instance, are almost perfectly suited for this. They run tutoring programs, literacy classes, community events, and technology help sessions. They maintain attendance records, and have experience with volunteers and programming. 

Parks departments similarly run stewardship events, youth sports, and host community gatherings. School districts coordinate everything from PTA-style parent support to after-school programs. Public health departments organize vaccination drives, outreach campaigns, training in first aid or emergency response. Nonprofits fill in the gaps within food distribution, arts programming, immigrant support, senior services, etc.

All of these actors already coordinate some kind of civic-labor. A civic currency merely gives them a standardized way to record and reward it.

The second group are the redeemers.  These are the institutions that accept credits in exchange for providing benefits. These tend to be organizations that control access to public goods with clear capacity constraints.  We can think of transit agencies issuing passes, recreation centers managing classes and gym time, museums and theaters issuing memberships or tickets, community colleges enrolling students in non-degree courses, childcare programs and after-school centers filling subsidized spots.

When a person spends credits at these institutions, they are converting their past civic contributions into present opportunities.

The third group are a diverse set of governors. These groups do not interact directly with individuals. Instead, they manage the system-level flow of credits between issuers and redeemers. Without them, the system would rapidly become unbalanced. If libraries and parks issue large volumes of credits, and transit accepts most of them, the transit agency would quickly find itself bearing the entire burden of redemption without a corresponding ability to issue credits back into the system. Clearing mechanisms allow the city to recognize that some institutions will be “net issuers,” and others will be “net redeemers,” and that someone has to manage this asymmetry.

Overseeing this is a set of governance and oversight entities, such as committees, councils, and boards that approve issuers, define tasks, set credit rates, manage redemption categories, protect privacy, and most importantly, respond when the system starts to misbehave. These bodies are where we locate the levers of control.

Finally, there are the participants themselves. A civic economic system won't succeed unless users become co-producers of civic life. If the system is to be legitimate, their experience and voice must be embedded into that governance, and they must have some lever for control.  

Establishing a Philosophy of Governance

A civic currency will not survive if it is governed like a central bank, with a single institution wielding technocratic control. Likewise if it is left to self-organize as a decentralized 'free-for-all'. Cities already operate through webs of semi-autonomous agencies that each hold some authority and answer to overlapping political and legal constraints. Governance for a civic currency must mirror that reality.  It must be polycentric.

Polycentric governance means that different aspects of the system are managed by different bodies, each with clearly bounded authority but also with overlapping membership and accountability. One committee may decide which institutions are allowed to issue credits. Another may approve which tasks count as civic labor. Another may set or adjust the number of credits awarded for different tasks. Another may oversee redemption capacity in high-demand services like transit or childcare. Another may monitor system-wide imbalances and arrange for clearing or backstops. Another may be responsible for privacy and data governance. Another may handle appeals and complaints.

Setting up a polycentric governance structure is essential for how a civic currency will operate in practice.

Non-coercion is another pillar of governance. Civic currency must never become a condition for maintaining citizenship or accessing basic services. Participation is an offer, not an obligation. The whole point is to decouple survival from employment, and then offer civic participation as an additional channel of meaning and access. If that participation is made compulsory, the moral logic collapses, and the system begins to resemble workfare.

Adaptation is the final pillar of governance. No initial design will perfectly anticipate all the ways people and institutions will behave. Some tasks will attract far more participation than expected, while others will languish. Credential requirements may inadvertently exclude exactly the people the system is meant to engage. Governance must be designed with trustworthy data sources and decision procedures that allow for continuous adjustment.

How Cities Manage Issuance

The issuance side of the system determines how civic-labor is recognized and converted into credits. The three governance processes that are central to issuance involve how accreditation is granted to issuers, defining tasks, and setting credit rates.

The process of accrediting issuers is both political and technical. On the political side, the city must decide whether only public agencies can issue credits, or whether certain nonprofits or quasi-public bodies can also participate, and what the prerequisites for that participation are.

On the technical side, it must ask whether the institution is capable of verifying that tasks were performed as claimed, if they can manage safety and risk, if they are able to adhere to privacy protections, and whether or not its issuance aligns public work with their civic mission.

An Issuer Accreditation Committee can be created for this purpose. It might include representatives from city administration, public agencies, nonprofits, and citizen councils. Institutions may apply to become issuers by submitting documentation about their programs, staffing, supervision practices, and civic objectives.

The committee reviews these applications, perhaps visits sites, and then decides whether to grant accreditation for a fixed period, say two or three years. Accreditation can be conditional, renewed, or revoked based on audits. Staggered terms for committee members and transparent criteria help ensure that accreditation does not become a vehicle for patronage or exclusion.

Once issuers are in place, the focus shifts to the tasks themselves. A civic currency needs a task catalog that establishes a structured inventory of activities that qualify for credit issuance. Tasks can be proposed by issuers but must be approved by a Task Catalog Committee.

For each proposed task, issuers specify the activity, the expected civic benefit, the duration, the supervision and verification mechanisms, any credential or background requirements, and constraints like minimum age. 

The committee evaluates whether the task produces genuine public value, whether the benefit accrues to the community rather than to a private actor, whether it can be safely supervised, and whether verification is feasible. A neighborhood cleanup organized by the parks department is an obvious candidate. A volunteer shift staffing a private gala is not.

The cataloging phase is also where equity considerations enter. If too many tasks require higher education credentials, language fluency, or flexible time schedules that only certain groups possess, the system risks reproducing existing inequalities. Committees may prefer to approve tasks that can be performed by people with different abilities, schedules, and backgrounds. 

Rate setting comes next. Not all civic tasks carry the same weight. Some are physically demanding, others require specialized training, others carry high emotional load, and others are low stakes but routine.

Some tasks might be in high civic demand and others may fail to find volunteers. Other tasks might reflect regional or local policy priorities. For example, if a city is at high wildfire risk, it may place special value on evacuation planning and emergency training for their citizens.

A Rate Setting Committee should be established to examine approved tasks and assign a credit value to each, often expressed per unit of time. The committee can use data where available. If the city has volunteered in these domains for years, it may already have statistics on participation rates and drop-off patterns. Tasks that historically struggle to attract volunteers might be given higher credits, while those that already have an abundance of eager participants might be set at lower levels. Tasks that require extensive training or recurring commitment might also earn more.

Rates are not fixed forever. They are reviewed periodically, perhaps once per quarter, during which the committee compares expected participation with actual behavior. If a task continues to go unfilled despite high credits, perhaps the barriers to participation exist elsewhere.

The location, the scheduling, or the way the task is advertised are all part of this dynamic. If a task is oversubscribed, credits might be reduced to free up participation for other needs. In this system, rate setting becomes one of the key levers for aligning civic labor with civic need.

An often overlooked implementation detail is the software backing these processes. A Task Catalog Management System allows issuers to submit proposals, committees to review and annotate them, and rate setters to track their decisions. Changes are logged. Decisions are timestamped.

This not only supports accountability but also creates a history of governance learning where future committees can see why a task was accepted, why its rate was changed, or why it was retired.

Redemption Management

While issuance deals with how credits enter the system, redemption deals with how they leave. (It's important to recall the structure of redemptions...when a credit is redeemed, it is destroyed. There is no re-use of civic credits once it has been redeemed for public goods or services.)

Managing the dynamics of redemption are much different than issuance, because they involve the intersection of civic currency with real capacity constraints in public goods and services.

Some redemption options will be universally attractive. Access to transit is one. If participants can exchange civic credits for bus or rail passes, many will want to do so. Childcare, after-school programs, and continuing education are similar, as they are expensive or inaccessible for many people, and civic redemption offers a way to reduce those costs. Other redemption options are enriching but not essential, such as museum visits or recreational classes.

One way we can think about this is by creating a redemption taxonomy. Essential services like transit and childcare can be thought of as “essential redemption goods”, or services that have high demand and clear utility.

Cultural and recreational offerings are “peripheral redemption goods”, that are somewhat more elastic in demand, but will nevertheless see a decent volume of exchange.

There are also institutions that might not issue or redeem large volumes but play critical roles in verifying participation or sharing infrastructure, such as libraries and community centers. They act as clearing and coordination nodes.

Redemption governance has to ensure that essential goods do not get overwhelmed by civic credits.

In practice, this means using tiered credit costs, quotas, scheduling windows, and sometimes eligibility rules. A monthly transit pass might cost many more credits than a museum ticket because it is far more in demand and expensive to provide.

Quotas might limit how many transit passes can be redeemed per month, forcing participants to decide whether to spend credits on transit now or on other goods. Scheduling windows might restrict certain redemptions to off-peak times, such as museum visits on weekdays rather than weekends.

These constraints may be technocratic, but they reflect the physical reality of cities. Buses have finite seats. Classrooms have finite chairs. Pools have finite lanes. A civic currency that pretends otherwise will crash into these limits.

A Redemption Oversight Council should be established to monitor usage patterns. It should look at how many credits are redeemed for each category, what the waitlists look like, where frustrations are highest, and which services are underutilized. When it sees patterns that could destabilize the system (transit redemptions rising far faster than projected), they could recommend adjustments in credit costs, quota levels, or expanding services to include more attractive redemption offerings. 

Backstops are also an important tool here too.

Some services, especially those that address mobility or child care, may never be able to “offset” redemption with equivalent civic-labor. They are infrastructural and capital intensive. The city may therefore decide that a certain fraction of the transit agency’s costs can be covered through civic redemption, and subsidize the rest through conventional budgets.

A portion of the city’s general fund, or earmarked grants, can be allocated to honor civic credits redeemed for essential services, ensuring that those services do not bear the full cost alone. This has to be negotiated transparently, otherwise the civic currency risks becoming another unfunded mandate.

Peripheral redemption goods, like cultural and recreational offerings, can be priced more lightly in credits to encourage uptake.

If museums struggle to attract visitors from historically excluded neighborhoods, civic credits can be a way to invite them in. If recreational classes are undersubscribed, credits can fill empty spots. In this way, the redemption layer becomes not just a way to distribute benefits, but a way to guide attention and participation towards underused public resources.

Managing Circulation Without Markets

Even though civic credits are non-transferable between individuals, there is still a circulation problem that governance must handle. Credits move through time and across institutional boundaries. They accumulate in personal accounts, then flow into transit or education or culture. That flow needs to be guided so that the system does not experience periodic surges or droughts.

One tool is time. Credits might have expiration dates or decay over time. This is not to punish participants, but to prevent hoarding and manage demand. If people can accumulate credits for years and then suddenly flood the system with redemptions, capacity planning becomes impossible. If credits expire after, say, eighteen or twenty-four months, participants are encouraged to redeem regularly, and administrators can more reliably predict demand.

Another tool is account caps. An individual might be allowed to hold only a certain number of credits at once. Once they reach that cap, they are welcome to continue contributing, but additional civic work will not earn more credits until they spend some. This seems harsh, but it focuses the system on spreading participation rather than maximizing credit accumulation by a small group of hyper-engaged people.

Portability is another aspect of circulation. What happens if someone moves from one part of the city to another, or from one city to a neighboring one that participates in the same network? If a city-regional civic currency emerges, the system must decide whether credits can be honored across jurisdictions. One approach is reciprocity, where credits earned in City A can be redeemed in City B within certain categories, even if the two cities may have slightly different rates or offerings. Agreements can be negotiated, much like how library cards or transit passes function across regional systems.

Data management underlies all of this. The system must maintain records of who earned what credits, when, and from which issuer, as well as where they were redeemed.

At the same time, it must not store more personally identifiable data than necessary. Participation logs should not become surveillance logs. To manage this, governance should adopt privacy principles such as data minimization, limitations of purpose, and establish limits on retention.

Detailed logs can be anonymized for analytics, with personally identifiable ties kept separate and protected. Privacy boards can audit practices and systems, and public reporting can build trust that the civic currency is not a hidden scoring system.

The Role of Data and Metrics

No governance system can operate blindly. If we want to talk seriously about the incremental optimization of a civic economy, we need to know what that economy looks like. Data make this possible. They do not tell us what to value, but they reveal how our choices are playing out.

Participation metrics answer basic questions, like how many unique people are earning credits? How often do they participate? How many different kinds of tasks do they engage in? Are they spread across neighborhoods and demographics, or clustered in a few well-served groups? If the system ends up being used mostly by college-educated residents in affluent neighborhoods, it is failing one of its core promises.

Task metrics reveal which civic roles are working and which are not. They show which tasks are consistently filled, which suffer from low uptake, which see high drop-out rates, which generate complaints, etc.

They can indicate whether the barrier lies in the task design, whether its the scheduling, the location, the credential requirement, or the credit rate. Combined with simple surveys, they can also reveal whether participants find certain tasks meaningful or merely transactional.

Redemption metrics track how credits are being used. They show whether transit is being overwhelmed, whether museum seats are going empty, whether adult education is seeing sustained engagement or only sporadic interest. They also reveal patterns across time, to identify surges in September when school starts, or in May when the weather improves. These patterns inform capacity planning and tiered credit adjustments.

Clearing metrics can operate at the institutional level. They show how many credits each issuer is releasing into the system and how many each redeemer is accepting. They highlight institutions that are carrying disproportionate loads, either on the issuance or redemption side. When an institution is persistently off-balance, the Clearing Council can explore adjustments in issuance, reallocating backstops, or revisiting the original redemption agreements.

Equity metrics can look at distribution across race, income, age, language, disability status, and geography. A system that looks healthy in aggregate may be failing severely for specific communities. If certain neighborhoods have few issuers or redeemers, the residents there may be effectively excluded. If certain demographic groups face language or accessibility barriers, they may be systematically left out of both earning and redemption.

Equity metrics push governance bodies to adapt by approving tasks in underserved neighborhoods, partnering with community organizations, adjusting eligibility rules, translating interfaces, or adding physical enrollment locations.

Cultural vitality metrics are harder to quantify but are just as important. They attempt to capture whether the civic currency is supporting a rich public life. Are people using credits to attend cultural events, take arts classes, join community workshops, or participate in festivals? Are they combining redemptions across domains?  Without this, a civic currency risks narrowing to a survival optimization tool, rather than a way to expand horizons and build communal connections.

These metrics can't be static dashboards admired for their own sake. They should feed into decision cycles. Committees should review them before meetings. Staff should prepare interpretive memos based on the information at hand. Participant councils should weigh in with qualitative narratives that complement the quantitative view. With data, the city can learn to read the “civic economy” the way central banks read financial economies, but with different north stars.

Acknowledging Failure Modes

Any system this complex will fail repeatedly and will probably do so in embarrassing ways. Governance design must include ideal workflows and a catalogue of anticipated failure modes with pre-agreed responses.

One failure mode is simple over-issuance. If committees approve too many tasks or set credit rates too high, the system can accumulate far more credits than it has capacity to redeem. Participants will earn credits only to find that transit passes are unavailable, classes are full, and cultural events are booked. The response here is to tighten issuance by pausing the issuance of new tasks, revisiting redemption rates, or retiring low-value tasks. This may be politically sensitive but also necessary. 

The opposite failure is under-issuance. If too few tasks are approved, or if issuers are concentrated in a few affluent neighborhoods, demand to participate will go unmet. People who would gladly contribute will not find accessible opportunities. Credits will feel rare and irrelevant. Here the response may be to open up new pathways for issuers, simplify task approvals, lower credential requirements, or actively recruit institutions in underserved areas.

Another failure involves credentialing. If many tasks require degrees, certifications, or background checks that are expensive or difficult to obtain, large segments of the population will be blocked from participation. This could turn the civic currency into a status marker for the already advantaged. Governance can respond by encouraging tasks that do not require advanced credentials, modularizing training into smaller, more accessible units, and providing pathways for participants to gain the necessary qualifications using credits.

Transit saturation is a particularly obvious failure mode, because mobility is so central to modern life. If civic credits become a significant channel for obtaining transit, and if the transit agency is not adequately funded or backstopped, service quality may deteriorate for everyone.

This can create a backlash not just against the civic currency but against the political actors who championed it. Addressing this requires a mix of tiering, quotas, and financial support. It may also require broadening the redemption universe so that participants do not feel their only meaningful use of credits is through transit or other "essential redemption goods".

Privacy breaches are another source of potential failures. If civic participation logs are leaked or repurposed for law enforcement or commercial targeting, trust will evaporate. Here governance has to act swiftly by investigating issues, sanctioning violators, tightening controls, and perhaps creating legal protections to prevent such activities.

Political capture is a slower failure mode but just as dangerous. A new administration may see the civic currency as a way to punish/reward or impose ideological tests. This is possible through accreditation decisions that favor politically aligned organizations, task approvals that subtly privilege certain agendas, or rate decisions that tilt the playing field to particular demographics. Polycentric governance and independent oversight bodies are sound safeguards, but they require vigilance. 

In each of these scenarios, the key is that the system has predefined avenues for recognition and response. Failure modes do not need to be completely prevented, but they need to be identifiable and correctable.

Scaling

If a civic currency proves workable in one city, it can work in others. I say this a lot, but at times I have to ask myself if that is true.

Scaling within a single city is one dimension.  Federation across cities or regions is another. The ability to scale beyond one city introduces new governance challenges, because now jurisdictions with different fiscal capacities and civic infrastructures must negotiate reciprocity.

One plausible path is regional, starting with functional regions like transit districts or school service areas. If a regional transit authority serves multiple municipalities, it might decide to accept civic credits earned in any member city under standardized conditions. That would require agreement among the cities on at least some core aspects of issuance and rate setting. Similarly, community colleges that serve broader regions could accept credits from multiple participating localities.

At a higher level, states could support civic currency by offering grants to municipalities that adopt interoperable standards or by integrating civic credits into state-level programs, such as tuition discounts for public universities or access to state parks. 

Scaling also reveals substantive limits. Not every city will have the same administrative capacity to run a civic currency. Not every public agency will want to participate. Some may see it as a distraction from their core missions. Others may fear the additional oversight.

There is a risk that civic currencies become another feature of well-resourced, governance-innovative cities and never reach places with the most need. A realistic view must admit this risk and see early adopters as both prototypes and advocates rather than proof of universal feasibility.

Governance IS the Real Innovation

In discussions about post-wage futures, a lot of energy is spent on imagining new distributions of money through basic incomes, negative income taxes, sovereign wealth fund dividends, yada yada. Less attention is paid to the distribution of recognition and purpose. The civic currency concept is one attempt to fill that gap, but its true innovation is not the idea that you can earn credits for volunteering and spend them on benefits. 

What is different here is how a civic currency works in practice through new methods of governance. This is a structured civic economy with explicit roles, procedures, committees, audits, and feedback loops.

It is designed to plug into the concrete realities of municipal governance that have procurement rules, staffing constraints, union agreements, privacy laws, election cycles, and budget negotiations. It acknowledges that any serious civic infrastructure will have to withstand boring things like committee meetings and quarterly reports.

A civic currency is a new layer of public administration. It asks agencies to see civic-labor as something to be cultivated and rewarded.  It gives participants an additional way to understand their relationship to the city, and to establish a civic identity beyond simply being a taxpayer. It gives policymakers a new set of dials to tune that aren’t fixated on tax rates or service cuts.

If we take seriously the idea that wage labor will no longer bear the entire burden of distributing value and meaning, then we should experiment with alternatives.

A civic currency, properly governed, is one such experiment. The only way for us to understand what is possible, is to see how these alternatives work in practice. 

In order to make that happen, we need to master the art and science of polycentric governance, and how it interacts with the existing structures available to us.

Chapter 5: The Politics of Civic-Labor

Revisit:
Chapter 1: The Unraveling of Wage Based Value
Chapter 2: Revealing Civic-Labor
Chapter 3: The Structure of a Public-Sector Currency

It is one thing to imagine that people could receive credits for civic work and spend them on public goods. It is another thing to embed that logic into real municipal institutions, with real capacity limits, real political oversight, real staff turnover, and real budgets in question. A civic currency is a proposed public institution, and institutions do not govern themselves. They are shaped by procedures, committees, oversight, and culture. If the goal is to understand how a civic currency backed by civic-labor works, then we have to show how it would be governed.

We need to describe in detail how a civic currency could operate in practice within a city, what governance structures it would require, what decisions those structures would make, what metrics they should monitor, and how the system could adapt over time. 

Before diving into governance, I want to be precise about what this proposed currency is and what it is not. A civic currency is not a second kind of money that floats in markets. It is not meant to be traded on exchanges, speculated on, hoarded as an asset, or used to pay rent or buy groceries. 

A civic currency is an accounting system for a specific domain of activity that logs publicly recognized contributions to the common good. When someone tutors a child at a public library or coaches a youth sports league, they are performing civic-labor. At present, that labor is either unpaid or poorly compensated, and in either case, it does not register in the way we track economic life. A civic currency simply declares that these contributions count, and we will record and recognize them.

That recognition takes the form of credits. Those credits are earned by doing approved tasks for accredited issuers, and they can later be redeemed for access to public goods offered by accredited redeemers. A person might earn credits tutoring at the library and spend them on transit passes, swimming lessons for their child, a museum membership, a community college course, or to supplement the cost for childcare services. The currency should not substitute for a living wage, but it should build a parallel channel of reciprocity that recognizes a different class of work.

Crucially, these credits should be non-transferable. They should attach to the person who earned them and should not be sold or gifted away. Doing this avoids turning the civic currency into an object of speculation, or a way for the already wealthy to purchase participation on the backs of others. Earning a civic credit represents something meaningful.

It also means that a credits circulation is not about market exchange but about how credits move across institutions as they are issued and redeemed.

All of this only works if there is a governance layer that decides what counts as civic labor, who is allowed to issue and redeem credits, how credits are valued, and how to keep the system from being captured or overwhelmed. 

Introducing the Players

To see how governance might function in a real setting, let's imagine a mid-sized city that is considering running a pilot. The city has a public library system, a parks and recreation department, a transit agency, a community college, several cultural institutions, a network of nonprofits, and a city hall with legal, budgeting, and IT capacities. This is the civic stack into which any new system must be inserted.

Within that stack, the first group of key players are the issuers.  These are institutions that can offer opportunities to execute on civic work, and verify that civic work has been done. Libraries, for instance, are almost perfectly suited for this. They run tutoring programs, literacy classes, community events, and technology help sessions. They maintain attendance records, and have experience with volunteers and programming. 

Parks departments similarly run stewardship events, youth sports, and host community gatherings. School districts coordinate everything from PTA-style parent support to after-school programs. Public health departments organize vaccination drives, outreach campaigns, training in first aid or emergency response. Nonprofits fill in the gaps within food distribution, arts programming, immigrant support, senior services, etc.

All of these actors already coordinate some kind of civic-labor. A civic currency merely gives them a standardized way to record and reward it.

The second group are the redeemers.  These are the institutions that accept credits in exchange for providing benefits. These tend to be organizations that control access to public goods with clear capacity constraints.  We can think of transit agencies issuing passes, recreation centers managing classes and gym time, museums and theaters issuing memberships or tickets, community colleges enrolling students in non-degree courses, childcare programs and after-school centers filling subsidized spots.

When a person spends credits at these institutions, they are converting their past civic contributions into present opportunities.

The third group are a diverse set of governors. These groups do not interact directly with individuals. Instead, they manage the system-level flow of credits between issuers and redeemers. Without them, the system would rapidly become unbalanced. If libraries and parks issue large volumes of credits, and transit accepts most of them, the transit agency would quickly find itself bearing the entire burden of redemption without a corresponding ability to issue credits back into the system. Clearing mechanisms allow the city to recognize that some institutions will be “net issuers,” and others will be “net redeemers,” and that someone has to manage this asymmetry.

Overseeing this is a set of governance and oversight entities, such as committees, councils, and boards that approve issuers, define tasks, set credit rates, manage redemption categories, protect privacy, and most importantly, respond when the system starts to misbehave. These bodies are where we locate the levers of control.

Finally, there are the participants themselves. A civic economic system won't succeed unless users become co-producers of civic life. If the system is to be legitimate, their experience and voice must be embedded into that governance, and they must have some lever for control.  

Establishing a Philosophy of Governance

A civic currency will not survive if it is governed like a central bank, with a single institution wielding technocratic control. Likewise if it is left to self-organize as a decentralized 'free-for-all'. Cities already operate through webs of semi-autonomous agencies that each hold some authority and answer to overlapping political and legal constraints. Governance for a civic currency must mirror that reality.  It must be polycentric.

Polycentric governance means that different aspects of the system are managed by different bodies, each with clearly bounded authority but also with overlapping membership and accountability. One committee may decide which institutions are allowed to issue credits. Another may approve which tasks count as civic labor. Another may set or adjust the number of credits awarded for different tasks. Another may oversee redemption capacity in high-demand services like transit or childcare. Another may monitor system-wide imbalances and arrange for clearing or backstops. Another may be responsible for privacy and data governance. Another may handle appeals and complaints.

Setting up a polycentric governance structure is essential for how a civic currency will operate in practice.

Non-coercion is another pillar of governance. Civic currency must never become a condition for maintaining citizenship or accessing basic services. Participation is an offer, not an obligation. The whole point is to decouple survival from employment, and then offer civic participation as an additional channel of meaning and access. If that participation is made compulsory, the moral logic collapses, and the system begins to resemble workfare.

Adaptation is the final pillar of governance. No initial design will perfectly anticipate all the ways people and institutions will behave. Some tasks will attract far more participation than expected, while others will languish. Credential requirements may inadvertently exclude exactly the people the system is meant to engage. Governance must be designed with trustworthy data sources and decision procedures that allow for continuous adjustment.

How Cities Manage Issuance

The issuance side of the system determines how civic-labor is recognized and converted into credits. The three governance processes that are central to issuance involve how accreditation is granted to issuers, defining tasks, and setting credit rates.

The process of accrediting issuers is both political and technical. On the political side, the city must decide whether only public agencies can issue credits, or whether certain nonprofits or quasi-public bodies can also participate, and what the prerequisites for that participation are.

On the technical side, it must ask whether the institution is capable of verifying that tasks were performed as claimed, if they can manage safety and risk, if they are able to adhere to privacy protections, and whether or not its issuance aligns public work with their civic mission.

An Issuer Accreditation Committee can be created for this purpose. It might include representatives from city administration, public agencies, nonprofits, and citizen councils. Institutions may apply to become issuers by submitting documentation about their programs, staffing, supervision practices, and civic objectives.

The committee reviews these applications, perhaps visits sites, and then decides whether to grant accreditation for a fixed period, say two or three years. Accreditation can be conditional, renewed, or revoked based on audits. Staggered terms for committee members and transparent criteria help ensure that accreditation does not become a vehicle for patronage or exclusion.

Once issuers are in place, the focus shifts to the tasks themselves. A civic currency needs a task catalog that establishes a structured inventory of activities that qualify for credit issuance. Tasks can be proposed by issuers but must be approved by a Task Catalog Committee.

For each proposed task, issuers specify the activity, the expected civic benefit, the duration, the supervision and verification mechanisms, any credential or background requirements, and constraints like minimum age. 

The committee evaluates whether the task produces genuine public value, whether the benefit accrues to the community rather than to a private actor, whether it can be safely supervised, and whether verification is feasible. A neighborhood cleanup organized by the parks department is an obvious candidate. A volunteer shift staffing a private gala is not.

The cataloging phase is also where equity considerations enter. If too many tasks require higher education credentials, language fluency, or flexible time schedules that only certain groups possess, the system risks reproducing existing inequalities. Committees may prefer to approve tasks that can be performed by people with different abilities, schedules, and backgrounds. 

Rate setting comes next. Not all civic tasks carry the same weight. Some are physically demanding, others require specialized training, others carry high emotional load, and others are low stakes but routine.

Some tasks might be in high civic demand and others may fail to find volunteers. Other tasks might reflect regional or local policy priorities. For example, if a city is at high wildfire risk, it may place special value on evacuation planning and emergency training for their citizens.

A Rate Setting Committee should be established to examine approved tasks and assign a credit value to each, often expressed per unit of time. The committee can use data where available. If the city has volunteered in these domains for years, it may already have statistics on participation rates and drop-off patterns. Tasks that historically struggle to attract volunteers might be given higher credits, while those that already have an abundance of eager participants might be set at lower levels. Tasks that require extensive training or recurring commitment might also earn more.

Rates are not fixed forever. They are reviewed periodically, perhaps once per quarter, during which the committee compares expected participation with actual behavior. If a task continues to go unfilled despite high credits, perhaps the barriers to participation exist elsewhere.

The location, the scheduling, or the way the task is advertised are all part of this dynamic. If a task is oversubscribed, credits might be reduced to free up participation for other needs. In this system, rate setting becomes one of the key levers for aligning civic labor with civic need.

An often overlooked implementation detail is the software backing these processes. A Task Catalog Management System allows issuers to submit proposals, committees to review and annotate them, and rate setters to track their decisions. Changes are logged. Decisions are timestamped.

This not only supports accountability but also creates a history of governance learning where future committees can see why a task was accepted, why its rate was changed, or why it was retired.

Redemption Management

While issuance deals with how credits enter the system, redemption deals with how they leave. (It's important to recall the structure of redemptions...when a credit is redeemed, it is destroyed. There is no re-use of civic credits once it has been redeemed for public goods or services.)

Managing the dynamics of redemption are much different than issuance, because they involve the intersection of civic currency with real capacity constraints in public goods and services.

Some redemption options will be universally attractive. Access to transit is one. If participants can exchange civic credits for bus or rail passes, many will want to do so. Childcare, after-school programs, and continuing education are similar, as they are expensive or inaccessible for many people, and civic redemption offers a way to reduce those costs. Other redemption options are enriching but not essential, such as museum visits or recreational classes.

One way we can think about this is by creating a redemption taxonomy. Essential services like transit and childcare can be thought of as “essential redemption goods”, or services that have high demand and clear utility.

Cultural and recreational offerings are “peripheral redemption goods”, that are somewhat more elastic in demand, but will nevertheless see a decent volume of exchange.

There are also institutions that might not issue or redeem large volumes but play critical roles in verifying participation or sharing infrastructure, such as libraries and community centers. They act as clearing and coordination nodes.

Redemption governance has to ensure that essential goods do not get overwhelmed by civic credits.

In practice, this means using tiered credit costs, quotas, scheduling windows, and sometimes eligibility rules. A monthly transit pass might cost many more credits than a museum ticket because it is far more in demand and expensive to provide.

Quotas might limit how many transit passes can be redeemed per month, forcing participants to decide whether to spend credits on transit now or on other goods. Scheduling windows might restrict certain redemptions to off-peak times, such as museum visits on weekdays rather than weekends.

These constraints may be technocratic, but they reflect the physical reality of cities. Buses have finite seats. Classrooms have finite chairs. Pools have finite lanes. A civic currency that pretends otherwise will crash into these limits.

A Redemption Oversight Council should be established to monitor usage patterns. It should look at how many credits are redeemed for each category, what the waitlists look like, where frustrations are highest, and which services are underutilized. When it sees patterns that could destabilize the system (transit redemptions rising far faster than projected), they could recommend adjustments in credit costs, quota levels, or expanding services to include more attractive redemption offerings. 

Backstops are also an important tool here too.

Some services, especially those that address mobility or child care, may never be able to “offset” redemption with equivalent civic-labor. They are infrastructural and capital intensive. The city may therefore decide that a certain fraction of the transit agency’s costs can be covered through civic redemption, and subsidize the rest through conventional budgets.

A portion of the city’s general fund, or earmarked grants, can be allocated to honor civic credits redeemed for essential services, ensuring that those services do not bear the full cost alone. This has to be negotiated transparently, otherwise the civic currency risks becoming another unfunded mandate.

Peripheral redemption goods, like cultural and recreational offerings, can be priced more lightly in credits to encourage uptake.

If museums struggle to attract visitors from historically excluded neighborhoods, civic credits can be a way to invite them in. If recreational classes are undersubscribed, credits can fill empty spots. In this way, the redemption layer becomes not just a way to distribute benefits, but a way to guide attention and participation towards underused public resources.

Managing Circulation Without Markets

Even though civic credits are non-transferable between individuals, there is still a circulation problem that governance must handle. Credits move through time and across institutional boundaries. They accumulate in personal accounts, then flow into transit or education or culture. That flow needs to be guided so that the system does not experience periodic surges or droughts.

One tool is time. Credits might have expiration dates or decay over time. This is not to punish participants, but to prevent hoarding and manage demand. If people can accumulate credits for years and then suddenly flood the system with redemptions, capacity planning becomes impossible. If credits expire after, say, eighteen or twenty-four months, participants are encouraged to redeem regularly, and administrators can more reliably predict demand.

Another tool is account caps. An individual might be allowed to hold only a certain number of credits at once. Once they reach that cap, they are welcome to continue contributing, but additional civic work will not earn more credits until they spend some. This seems harsh, but it focuses the system on spreading participation rather than maximizing credit accumulation by a small group of hyper-engaged people.

Portability is another aspect of circulation. What happens if someone moves from one part of the city to another, or from one city to a neighboring one that participates in the same network? If a city-regional civic currency emerges, the system must decide whether credits can be honored across jurisdictions. One approach is reciprocity, where credits earned in City A can be redeemed in City B within certain categories, even if the two cities may have slightly different rates or offerings. Agreements can be negotiated, much like how library cards or transit passes function across regional systems.

Data management underlies all of this. The system must maintain records of who earned what credits, when, and from which issuer, as well as where they were redeemed.

At the same time, it must not store more personally identifiable data than necessary. Participation logs should not become surveillance logs. To manage this, governance should adopt privacy principles such as data minimization, limitations of purpose, and establish limits on retention.

Detailed logs can be anonymized for analytics, with personally identifiable ties kept separate and protected. Privacy boards can audit practices and systems, and public reporting can build trust that the civic currency is not a hidden scoring system.

The Role of Data and Metrics

No governance system can operate blindly. If we want to talk seriously about the incremental optimization of a civic economy, we need to know what that economy looks like. Data make this possible. They do not tell us what to value, but they reveal how our choices are playing out.

Participation metrics answer basic questions, like how many unique people are earning credits? How often do they participate? How many different kinds of tasks do they engage in? Are they spread across neighborhoods and demographics, or clustered in a few well-served groups? If the system ends up being used mostly by college-educated residents in affluent neighborhoods, it is failing one of its core promises.

Task metrics reveal which civic roles are working and which are not. They show which tasks are consistently filled, which suffer from low uptake, which see high drop-out rates, which generate complaints, etc.

They can indicate whether the barrier lies in the task design, whether its the scheduling, the location, the credential requirement, or the credit rate. Combined with simple surveys, they can also reveal whether participants find certain tasks meaningful or merely transactional.

Redemption metrics track how credits are being used. They show whether transit is being overwhelmed, whether museum seats are going empty, whether adult education is seeing sustained engagement or only sporadic interest. They also reveal patterns across time, to identify surges in September when school starts, or in May when the weather improves. These patterns inform capacity planning and tiered credit adjustments.

Clearing metrics can operate at the institutional level. They show how many credits each issuer is releasing into the system and how many each redeemer is accepting. They highlight institutions that are carrying disproportionate loads, either on the issuance or redemption side. When an institution is persistently off-balance, the Clearing Council can explore adjustments in issuance, reallocating backstops, or revisiting the original redemption agreements.

Equity metrics can look at distribution across race, income, age, language, disability status, and geography. A system that looks healthy in aggregate may be failing severely for specific communities. If certain neighborhoods have few issuers or redeemers, the residents there may be effectively excluded. If certain demographic groups face language or accessibility barriers, they may be systematically left out of both earning and redemption.

Equity metrics push governance bodies to adapt by approving tasks in underserved neighborhoods, partnering with community organizations, adjusting eligibility rules, translating interfaces, or adding physical enrollment locations.

Cultural vitality metrics are harder to quantify but are just as important. They attempt to capture whether the civic currency is supporting a rich public life. Are people using credits to attend cultural events, take arts classes, join community workshops, or participate in festivals? Are they combining redemptions across domains?  Without this, a civic currency risks narrowing to a survival optimization tool, rather than a way to expand horizons and build communal connections.

These metrics can't be static dashboards admired for their own sake. They should feed into decision cycles. Committees should review them before meetings. Staff should prepare interpretive memos based on the information at hand. Participant councils should weigh in with qualitative narratives that complement the quantitative view. With data, the city can learn to read the “civic economy” the way central banks read financial economies, but with different north stars.

Acknowledging Failure Modes

Any system this complex will fail repeatedly and will probably do so in embarrassing ways. Governance design must include ideal workflows and a catalogue of anticipated failure modes with pre-agreed responses.

One failure mode is simple over-issuance. If committees approve too many tasks or set credit rates too high, the system can accumulate far more credits than it has capacity to redeem. Participants will earn credits only to find that transit passes are unavailable, classes are full, and cultural events are booked. The response here is to tighten issuance by pausing the issuance of new tasks, revisiting redemption rates, or retiring low-value tasks. This may be politically sensitive but also necessary. 

The opposite failure is under-issuance. If too few tasks are approved, or if issuers are concentrated in a few affluent neighborhoods, demand to participate will go unmet. People who would gladly contribute will not find accessible opportunities. Credits will feel rare and irrelevant. Here the response may be to open up new pathways for issuers, simplify task approvals, lower credential requirements, or actively recruit institutions in underserved areas.

Another failure involves credentialing. If many tasks require degrees, certifications, or background checks that are expensive or difficult to obtain, large segments of the population will be blocked from participation. This could turn the civic currency into a status marker for the already advantaged. Governance can respond by encouraging tasks that do not require advanced credentials, modularizing training into smaller, more accessible units, and providing pathways for participants to gain the necessary qualifications using credits.

Transit saturation is a particularly obvious failure mode, because mobility is so central to modern life. If civic credits become a significant channel for obtaining transit, and if the transit agency is not adequately funded or backstopped, service quality may deteriorate for everyone.

This can create a backlash not just against the civic currency but against the political actors who championed it. Addressing this requires a mix of tiering, quotas, and financial support. It may also require broadening the redemption universe so that participants do not feel their only meaningful use of credits is through transit or other "essential redemption goods".

Privacy breaches are another source of potential failures. If civic participation logs are leaked or repurposed for law enforcement or commercial targeting, trust will evaporate. Here governance has to act swiftly by investigating issues, sanctioning violators, tightening controls, and perhaps creating legal protections to prevent such activities.

Political capture is a slower failure mode but just as dangerous. A new administration may see the civic currency as a way to punish/reward or impose ideological tests. This is possible through accreditation decisions that favor politically aligned organizations, task approvals that subtly privilege certain agendas, or rate decisions that tilt the playing field to particular demographics. Polycentric governance and independent oversight bodies are sound safeguards, but they require vigilance. 

In each of these scenarios, the key is that the system has predefined avenues for recognition and response. Failure modes do not need to be completely prevented, but they need to be identifiable and correctable.

Scaling

If a civic currency proves workable in one city, it can work in others. I say this a lot, but at times I have to ask myself if that is true.

Scaling within a single city is one dimension.  Federation across cities or regions is another. The ability to scale beyond one city introduces new governance challenges, because now jurisdictions with different fiscal capacities and civic infrastructures must negotiate reciprocity.

One plausible path is regional, starting with functional regions like transit districts or school service areas. If a regional transit authority serves multiple municipalities, it might decide to accept civic credits earned in any member city under standardized conditions. That would require agreement among the cities on at least some core aspects of issuance and rate setting. Similarly, community colleges that serve broader regions could accept credits from multiple participating localities.

At a higher level, states could support civic currency by offering grants to municipalities that adopt interoperable standards or by integrating civic credits into state-level programs, such as tuition discounts for public universities or access to state parks. 

Scaling also reveals substantive limits. Not every city will have the same administrative capacity to run a civic currency. Not every public agency will want to participate. Some may see it as a distraction from their core missions. Others may fear the additional oversight.

There is a risk that civic currencies become another feature of well-resourced, governance-innovative cities and never reach places with the most need. A realistic view must admit this risk and see early adopters as both prototypes and advocates rather than proof of universal feasibility.

Governance IS the Real Innovation

In discussions about post-wage futures, a lot of energy is spent on imagining new distributions of money through basic incomes, negative income taxes, sovereign wealth fund dividends, yada yada. Less attention is paid to the distribution of recognition and purpose. The civic currency concept is one attempt to fill that gap, but its true innovation is not the idea that you can earn credits for volunteering and spend them on benefits. 

What is different here is how a civic currency works in practice through new methods of governance. This is a structured civic economy with explicit roles, procedures, committees, audits, and feedback loops.

It is designed to plug into the concrete realities of municipal governance that have procurement rules, staffing constraints, union agreements, privacy laws, election cycles, and budget negotiations. It acknowledges that any serious civic infrastructure will have to withstand boring things like committee meetings and quarterly reports.

A civic currency is a new layer of public administration. It asks agencies to see civic-labor as something to be cultivated and rewarded.  It gives participants an additional way to understand their relationship to the city, and to establish a civic identity beyond simply being a taxpayer. It gives policymakers a new set of dials to tune that aren’t fixated on tax rates or service cuts.

If we take seriously the idea that wage labor will no longer bear the entire burden of distributing value and meaning, then we should experiment with alternatives.

A civic currency, properly governed, is one such experiment. The only way for us to understand what is possible, is to see how these alternatives work in practice. 

In order to make that happen, we need to master the art and science of polycentric governance, and how it interacts with the existing structures available to us.

Chapter 5: The Politics of Civic-Labor