Promise Fund

The Promise Fund is a new way to create a global interoperable Time Bank, which has the unique feature of being able to turn promises of help, into Time Credits.

We are building a universal TimeBank on the blockchain, integrating a unique form a time based crowd funding.

TimeBanks are great but they have not scaled or made use of their potential on the internet. While with crowd funding sites there is no way to donate time and skills. Our prototype is able to bake promises into a decentralised ledger that potentially lasts forever, scales globally and it's accessible to everyone. This makes these pledges a real commitment, as your children and grand children, will be able to view them as a public record. Instead of individual data silos, the Promise Fund provides a transparent ledger of transactions, that allows us to achieve interoperability between local Time Banks.

A globally accessible ledger of time transactions, also has the great benefit of opening up the space of innovation to multiple parties. Development of applications becomes possible using the widest range of tools, and skills sets. Nor is development and the sustainability of the network dependent on any one actor or server.

The Promise Fund is a new form of Time Bank, that is a protocol, based on a distributed ledger, maintained by a community of users, not a server maintained by an admin. Time Credits are issued every time a member records a pledge on our website, or using our mobile application. These videos are cryptographically signed using robust identities provided by an implementation of the WC3 Identity group, and added to a permanent decentralised open source storage system called IPFS. These promises are permanently linked to this identity, and time stamped using a custom modification of open source software called the Eternity Wall, which enters a hash that proves the association between the promise and the user at the given time. Our software accesses this transparent ledger of pseudo-anonymous users and transactions to display the promises and time balances. As a user earns time credits they are able to redeem their pledges at which point they are marked ad fulfilled. The blockchain is a globally accessible secure and verifiable ledger. This forms the basis of a new and important form of reputation, which can be used by individuals, to potential employers as it is not forgeable, and to funders.

The prototype we have built is a cross platform desktop, Android and iOS application that is able to record video interviews, or pledges from participants on location. These videos are then marked up with metadata, which includes the number of hours or work pledged, and the identity of the pledger. The prototype includes a decentralised and secure identity management system based on emerging WC3 standards, and code based on the Eternity Wall, that enables the videos and metadata to be provably linked to a permanent decentralised archive of video pledges. The next stage is to integrate these three components.

TimeBanks are widely popular, with hundreds of community TimeBanks world wide. Community currencies, and crypto-currencies such as bitcoin, are growing in popularity rapidly. however their popularity is limited by the inability to associate your time balances with your won portable identity, in an increasingly mobile world. Our experience developing the P2P education platform for the Viral Academy, both with focus groups online, in Italy, Germany, Sweden and the UK, informed the design of the current proposal. Additionally, in interviews with online community projects, such as EdgeRyders, Ouishare, NextEdge, and physical spaces such as hacklabs, makerlabs and fablabs, there was a clear expressed need to use a community currency within their communities. Finally at conferences, and in follow up, we discussed the needs of open source projects, and over half those interviewed were interested in volunteering time to promote and manage a wider community involvement in their projects. A particular concern that our project addresses is not to lose the community and voluntary feel of the projects. The use of pledges is appealing as it acts both as an endorsement and mitigates the "counting" or inhuman aspects of bank balances and spread sheets.

TimeBanks are traditionally used in a community setting, with a focus on care of the aged, health and community activity. Through an import and export facility existing timeBanks will be able to add their transactions to the blockchain, enabling their users to move between time banks, attracting them to our more mobile and portable solution. However our focus will be non-traditional timeBank users, and in particular young people involved in maker, or open source communities. The use of the blockchain to create a more robust provable time based currency will facilitate exchanges online and between users in different countries.