The story of TimeBucks is so intertwined with my life that when Neva, our communications volunteer, suggested I write a history of TimeBucks, I decided to make it personal.

In 1996 I was inspired by Seattle's local Fremont Time, a local community skills exchange that valued everyone's time equally to build community and create social capital. I believed a similar service with an Internet portal could be more efficient and cost-effective. I took leave of my job in 1996 to work in the back room of the Speakeasy cafe, which generously allowed me to plug into their network so I could work.

The task of building the kind of service I'd imagined turned out to be much more difficult than I thought and I wasn't able to get it up and running in the time-frame I'd hoped. I continued working on TimeBucks off and on over the next couple of years. In 1998, I moved to Vashon Island where I joined the "Vashon Time" steering committee and participated in our local time-exchange program. We gave orientations about how to trade time. We kept track of trades with a phone message machine and printed out directories that people could pick up at the local copy store.

It took a lot of work to print directories, keep track of member balances, and host orientations. Nonetheless, there was resistance to using an on-line service because we didn't want to alienate people who didn't use computers.

While living on Vashon Island, my housemates and I invited Michael Linton, the founder of the LETS system, to come out and stay with us for a few days and talk about his vision of community currencies. I was deeply inspired by his vision for how currency could create a better world.

I went back to computer consulting now and then but my heart wasn't in it, and working on TimeBucks in my spare time was draining. The program I had been tinkering with for years still wasn't good enough to demonstrate its potential. I decided to leave my consulting career in 2001 to focus on TimeBucks full time.

From 2001 and 2002 I lived in a walk-in waterfront cabin on Vashon Island where I worked developing and finally launched TimeBucks as a business. Some Vashon friends joined, but I knew that I would need a lot more people to sign up if this was going to work.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get nearly enough people to sign up to make it work. I was demoralized. Lacking clear direction, I decided to go to Buenos Aires, where Argentinians were in the midst of a financial crisis. While there, I met the founders of creditos, a group that printed their own currency, and decided to launch a Spanish version of TimeBucks.

I converted TimeBucks into Spanish and adopted it to a model that could used for economic development during challenging economic times. I made an agreement with a small business owner to use his Internet/phone shop to register members and hired someone to hand out flyers on the busy pedestrian walkways of Florida and Lavalle streets in downtown Buenos Aires.

Again, I couldn't get people to use the service.

I didn't know what to do when I returned to Seattle 7 months. But after posting a message to craigslist, some people started to sign up in December 2004. I felt encouraged. I've continued working on TimeBucks full time since then, redesigning and improving the system.

Although TimeBucks hasn't been sustainable (yet!) I feel incredibly fortunate to be working on a project that I feel has the power the transform our lives so completely. Read Why I Care to learn more about why I intend to work on this project until it is successful.