About

A neighborhood ledger.

Hands is a Portland-only listings platform with an integrated time-bank. Designers, builders, tradespeople, organizers, residents, and people in need use it to find each other around shared physical work — tools, materials, labor, skills, and design help.

Anyone can browse. To post or claim, you're vouched in by a neighbor. One hour of work earns one token; the same token claims an hour back. Materials move freely as gifts. Skills move on a ledger.

Where it is right now

v1 is in active build. Magic-link signup, accounts with role badges, session management, and new-device alerts all work. Vouching, posting, claiming, and the token ledger ship in Phase 2-5. Listings on display today are seeded — real ones arrive when the first 50 vouched accounts do.

The full design spec, roadmap, and decisions log live in the project repository alongside the source. Hands is free, open, AGPL-3.0 software. Forks must stay open.

How this differs from what already exists

• Buy Nothing, Freecycle, Craigslist handle individual neighbors and casual giveaways. Hands serves organized work — repair clinics, design help, build days.
• Architecture firms' pro-bono programs serve incorporated nonprofits. Hands also serves individuals — tenants, organizers, neighbors.
• Slack, Discord, Facebook Groups are where most mutual aid currently lives. Hands exists to be a better home for the parts of that work that need to outlast a chat scroll.
• Other time-banks (TimeBanks USA, hOurworld) handle skill exchange but not the messy edge cases — material reuse, build-day call-outs, the in-between work where money and skill blur.

Why Portland, why this audience

Portland has an active mutual-aid scene, real tenant infrastructure (Portland Tenants United, Community Alliance of Tenants, Street Roots), a design and architecture community at PSU and AIA Portland, and a reuse anchor in the ReBuilding Center. The platform is movement- bounded inside the geography: housing justice, mutual aid, and public-interest design.

Lineage

Hands is research-by-design output of an architecture thesis — Towards an Anarchitecture: Building without authority — that treats the platform as prefigurative spatial practice at digital scale. The visual language borrows from the movement-zine tradition (KC Tenants, the Autonomous Tenants Union, A Radical Guide) and the printed-bulletin / ledger discipline of classifieds and time-bank logs.

Open questions

Domain. Fiscal sponsor. First-50 invitations. Most resolve through doing, not announcing. If you have a real listing to add or want to be involved, the contact link in the footer reaches the founder.