Currency, Caffeine and Codeathons
3/27/2007 – Rich Vazquez and Tom Brown present at Cafe Caffeine in Austin, Texas. Greg Foster attends. They discuss how  complementary currency software should be open source.  (Credit to Douglas Rushkoff for the phrase “Open Source Currency”)
4/11/2007 – Rich, Greg, Tom decide to go with ruby on rails over php. They determined that working with data was easier with rails objects, they impressed with the rails console and the codeathon was a good opportunity to learn more about rails.
4/20/2007 – Codeathon: project named austen. This was organized by Silona Bonewald and the League of Technical Voters. Part of the bylaws of LOTV is that all code must be open source. The project name is an acronym for Austin Time Exchange Network.
8/2007 – Project renamed to oscurrency.

An Idea Grows in Austin
4/15/2008 – Amy Kirschner and Tom meet at unmoney convergence
8/26/2008 – Rich recommends Insoshi as a base for the code. At the time, rails was on version 2.1. Some of the rails social network software looked good but included so-called engines which didn’t seem very maintainable.
8/27/2008 – Tom Tweets from Cafe Caffeine
9/3/2008 – First Commit: started adding openid to insoshi. There was a request on the insoshi google group for openid two weeks prior: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/insoshi/W8_BQNrNni4
9/22/2008 – One Web Day presentation
11/9/2008 – Austin Time Exchange switches to oscurrency. 100 people are migrated from local-exchange: http://sourceforge.net/projects/local-exchange/

Going Live
7/2009 – The new Bay Area Community Exchange goes live with oscurrency
7/24/2009 – First OpenTransact screencast
8/29/2009 – Rich and Tom present “Using Insoshi to Support Community Currencies” at Lonestar Ruby Conference 2009
9/2009 – Lee Azzarello starts adding Heroku deployment feature to oscurrency. This allows for much easier deployments and adds a  common deployment procedure so that not everyone has to roll their own or have their own unique deployment bugs.

Upgrades
3/2010 – Internationalization. Rails 2.2 (11/21/2008) added support for internationalization (i18n). This allows a developer to remove the text from the web pages and replace them with labels which will display text in a different language depending on which locale is chosen as long as the developer provides a configuration file for that language which indexes the labels to the text for that language.
4/2010 – Mike Travers makes oscurrency more Heroku friendly by switching search and background processing components
5/2010 – Oscurrency switches to authlogic for authentication. The original authentication that came with insoshi allowed you to retrieve the password from the database. If someone gets access to the database and the encryption key, then they can get all the passwords. authlogic hashes the passwords so that this attack is no longer possible. Instead of comparing passwords, hashes of passwords are compared. Authlogic also makes it easy to support standards and custom encryption schemes.

Greek and Specs
7/2011 – Athens timebank goes live, Rails 3 upgrade begins.
10/19/2011 – First draft of OpenTransact spec written at Internet Identity Workshop 13. Opentransact is a simple building block that allows a number of common use cases to be solved in a way that is interoperable among different software.

Refactoring and B2B Growth
8/2012 – The big rails 3.1 refactoring begins with Saverio Trioni and Jeff Aldrich.
10/2012 – The Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility Marketplace becomes the first b2b trade network to use oscurrency.
12/2012 – attachment-fu is replaced with carrierwave

Pulling Ourselves Up By Our Bootstrap
1/2013 – bootstrap ui upgrade begins with first pull request
10/2013 – Website moves from blogger to wordpress