Growing up in the city, Hsu Chien-chih (徐健智) had never lived in the country. But at age 25 he decided to open a “free shop,” a shared kitchen and hitchhiking service in the Shi'erliao district of Emei Township, Hsinchu County. Together with friends he also developed the TimeLinker app, using the concept of exchanging skills and expertise -- helping other people and in the process obtaining help from others in exchange. He and his younger sister Hsu Chi-jung (徐棋容) yearned for an ideal lifestyle of sharing resources and dreamed that here they could create a free life circle, breaking the principle of only using money for transactions and make everyone reconsider the connection between price and value.
(Image: FTV)
The items in the free shop are unneeded things donated by local people so visitors to the store can look for what they need. This model is similar to the Hakka lifestyle of old. Hsu said he discovered that local people are contented and not greedy, and are happy to share. Further, this concept of sharing and helping each other can also help the area smoothly develop. In the store, in addition to exchanging items, Hsu’s younger sister Hsu Chi-jung also operates a shared kitchen. Once a week, tourists who stay there in return for work have lunch together with local seniors, giving older people who live alone a chance to get out of the house and interact with others.
(Image: FTV)
The free store is just a beginning, Hsu Chien-chih says, and what he wants to promote is TimeLinker. His and his group of partners’ idea is to let people with available time do things for people without the time, and be rewarded for it. Matching manpower and materials, users with expert skills can help to resolve other people’s problems, and resolve their own manpower or material needs with an exchange of time credits. He gives an example: if today he helped someone fix water or electricity, or fix a toilet, he can obtain one hour of time credit. Then, whenever he needs someone to walk the dog or mind the store, he can use this to get a partner to help out. The TimeLinker app they developed now has thousands of users around Taiwan and their dream is expand to food, clothing, housing, transport, education and leisure, creating a self-sufficient, no-money ideal world where one may still pursue a good life, expanding the sharing concept to all of Taiwan and transforming the value of time.
Based on the idea of commonality, Hsu and his partners established Start Ltd (時答特股份有限公司), whose operating goal is to produce simple means to resolve multifaceted social issues through sustainable methods. Accordingly, all products developed by Timelinker must conform to the spirit of One for All (14A).
The TimeLinker’s service platform’s first innovative product for the TimeLinker team, in addition to combining the “sharing economy” and TimeLinker’s fundamental concept, takes the earlier community lifestyle of neighbors helping one another and reintroduces it into today’s world with the use of a modern digital phone app in the hope that every user can regain self-worth and happiness.