Community Forge
Community Forge is a volunteer-run nonprofit that designs, develops and freely hosts open-source software for local exchange systems, time banks and complementary currencies. It has provided the accounting and community platform behind more than 400 mutual-credit groups — mostly francophone SELs — letting neighbourhoods run their own interest-free currencies at near-zero cost on infrastructure they can also self-host.
The quiet infrastructure layer under 400+ francophone mutual-credit communities: open-source, debt-free by design, and genuinely mission-pure, but volunteer-run and donation-funded, which caps both its reach and its durability.
M69 Score
Scored against the Money2069 Manifesto — see methodology. Higher = more aligned.
Detailed Rating Breakdown
Issuance Model3x4.0
The platform implements mutual credit: balances are created and destroyed symmetrically when members trade real goods and services. Debt-free, elastic, tied to actual exchange — the model M69 favours, delivered as infrastructure.
Spending Power Stability2x3.0
Units are community-defined (hours or local units of account), which anchors value to labour in most hosted SELs, but there is no stability mechanism or measurement; each community's unit floats on its own norms.
Fiat Independence & Interoperability2x4.0
Hosted currencies are denominated in their own units with zero reserves and no banking dependency; the platform's entire purpose is local currency composability, though interoperability between hosted groups remains informal rather than an adopted open standard.
Traction2x3.0
Over 400 communities served across 15+ years with visibly active hosted SELs and ongoing news (April 2026), but the network is maintenance-mode: modest user counts per group, no business adoption, niche recognition.
Sovereignty3.0
Fully open-source and self-hostable, which is the strongest possible exit guarantee; in practice most groups rely on Community Forge's central hosting and a small volunteer core, a real key-person concentration.
Governance2.0
A small volunteer association governs informally; hosted communities govern themselves. No formal separation of monetary and operational decisions, no charter beyond the nonprofit's statutes.
Resilience3.0
Long survival on tiny resources and a simple, rebuildable stack, but donation-only funding — the April 2026 appeal for support is explicit — keeps long-term maintenance permanently at risk.
Inclusivity4.0
Free or near-free for communities and members, no gatekeeping, and it concretely lowers the barrier for any neighbourhood to start its own currency; benefits flow entirely to the communities it serves.