What is this Ŧ I see everywhere on this site?

Q. What's this Ŧ sign all about?
It's an obscure Unicode character that we chose as the symbol for our pseudo-currency. It's like the € sign, or the $, or the £.  It's short for Temporaries, or Temps if you want to be less short. You could write those words out as Ŧemporaries/Ŧemps if you really want, but we're too lazy.

Q. So it's a form of money?
Yes and no. It's technically a token built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a crypto-currency, but we're not aiming to replace Euros or create a stand-alone economy. Rather, we think of it as a complementary currency, a way in which we can make our creative participation cumulative and collective.

Q. How do I get Temps?
Right now, there are two ways: you can participate in the activities at Temporary, or you can straight-up purchase them.  The going rate is 1Ŧ for 1€.

But every activity, including our daily Open Time, awards you Ŧ just for showing up. It's like generating money out of thin air, except it's not really money.

Q. What do the coins look like?
They don't look like anything. It's an entirely digital currency.

Q. What can I do with Ŧs?
If you would like to organise your own experimental events at Temporary, you can spend your Ŧs to do this, in lieu of paying a venue rental fee or other costs. You can also pledge your Ŧs to other people's proposals - all proposals require support from at least two people, to encourage us to take an interest in all of the things that happen here. You can also transfer your Ŧs to other users for whatever reason you want: as a tip, in exchange for offline goods and services, etc.

Q. What is 'Biathlon'?
Biathlon is the name of the model we created for this - a blockchain-based suite of software to enable participatory culture production. We called it Biathlon, which is that sport where you have to ski and shoot (ampumahiihto in Finnish), because we felt like that was a good metaphor for the current cultural paradigm - that we are all being stretched thin, forced to master different and dynamic skills; we also are focused on trans-disciplinary cuture so the metaphor seems to work there too, somewhat.

Temporary, the place, is really just a way to test out if Biathlon works by making a regular environment to generate activities and see who shows up. If it goes well, we'd like to make it possible for other initiatives to use Biathlon too.

Q. What's the point of all this?
We've been having the same conversations for years about how to make our creative activities more sustainable, not just in a financial sense but in terms of our own energy. We've been into participation-based cultural programming for some time, but felt that the administrative burdens still fell to a small group of core professionals. Biathlon/Temporary is not necessarily the answer, but we're going to try it for a bit and see what works, and what doesn't.