Creator Tech Jam Participant Brief

Context-sharing, co-prototyping, and Indigenous economic design for Life at the Centre

Core frame: The Creator Tech Jam is not a conventional hackathon. It is a context-sharing and co-prototyping session where lived knowledge, Indigenous economic design, and AI-assisted tools are brought together to prototype experiences for Life at the Centre.

1. Purpose

The Creator Tech Jam brings together values-aligned technologists, artists, designers, entrepreneurs, students, and community builders to prototype digital experiences for the Life at the Centre Festival in June 2027. These experiences will help participants encounter, practice, and contribute to an Indigenomics-inspired relational economy.

To understand what we're building toward, it helps to start with the canoe.

For Indigenous Peoples, the canoe is more than transportation. It is a system of design that carries people across place and carries knowledge, protocol, and purpose across generations. Every element is intentional: the resource it's made from, every role on board, the direction set by relationship to place. Indigenous economies have always worked this way.

The Creator Tech Jam is a gathering of canoes. Each team is a canoe, and we are a fleet setting out together. The work begins with what each canoe is made from: people, place, relationships, protocol, data responsibility, and the forms of value moving through the festival ecosystem. Context is the resource. Everything we build is shaped by how carefully we hold it.

2. The Challenge

How might we design a digital experience that recognizes and amplifies a relational economy at the Indigenomics Life at the Centre Festival, where value emerges through participation, contribution, reciprocity, and the movement of wealth among participants?

• Build something playable, usable, or meaningfully testable on-site by real festival participants.
• Possible forms include a web app, AI tool, interactive map, festival exchange system, digital wallet, governance tool, QR/NFC experience, story-based interface, or hybrid digital/physical installation.
• The prototype should help people experience Indigenous-based economic design in practice, not simply describe it.

3. Why Context Comes Before Code

With current AI coding tools, product people and non-developers can participate more directly in prototyping when they have the right support. Code can now move quickly. Context must move carefully.

• A shallow prompt produces a shallow system. A well-held context can become a working prototype that carries relationship, responsibility, and purpose.
• The key design question: What context did you honour?
• The deeper build question: What should technology make more visible, more accessible, or more reciprocal? What should technology not touch?

4. Who Is Invited

The jam is designed for people who hold context, build prototypes, translate between worlds, and steward relationships. Participants do not need to arrive as expert developers.