For institutions
Time Capsule is not just a personal tool. It was built with institutional use in mind: exhibits that capture a community at a moment in time, university traditions, alumni archives, cultural events that want to leave something behind for the future.
Run a time-capsule exhibit where visitors contribute answers to curated questions. A year or five years from now, the capsules unlock — and the institution has a living archive of what people were thinking at that moment.
Incoming students seal a capsule at enrollment. Graduating students open it four years later. The contrast between who they were and who they became is the document. Alumni can do the same across decades.
Capture what people are feeling at a specific cultural moment — a festival, a centenary, a community milestone. Open the collective capsule in ten years and see what the community was hoping for.
Seal a capsule at a company's founding, a major product launch, or a team's formation. Open it at an anniversary and let the original vision speak for itself — without the gloss of hindsight.
Structured interviews, at scale, for communities that want to preserve voices before they are lost. Questions drawn from the Proust Questionnaire, 7 Billion Others, and the Book of Lives tradition.
Congregations, civic societies, neighborhood groups — any community that wants a shared record of who its people were at a given moment in time, meant to be revisited later.
We help you select or design a curated set of questions suited to your audience and purpose — from the full Proust Questionnaire to a focused 5-question set specific to your event or community.
Each participant answers the questions and seals their own capsule. Text, audio, and file attachments are supported. No account creation required — just an email address for the unlock notification.
All capsules for an event share the same unlock date — a year from now, five years, ten years, or longer. Each participant gets their own private capsule link plus an unlock reminder email.
When the capsules unlock, the institution can host a reopening — a reading, a screening, an exhibit showing what participants said and what has changed. The unlock date is a second event, free to plan.
Participants can opt in to sharing their answers (anonymously or attributed) with the broader Book of Lives public archive — becoming part of a collective human document across cultures and generations.
StoryCorps, 7 Billion Others, the Future Library, the Crypt of Civilization — the strongest institutional memory projects all share a common structure: a curated question set, a defined participant community, and a fixed unlock or sharing date. The power is in the constraint and the delay.
Time Capsule is designed to make that structure accessible without a production budget. The encryption is cryptographic — no administrator can read the content early, even if they wanted to. The unlock is mathematically enforced, not policy-enforced.
We are interested in partnerships with museums, universities, oral history projects, and cultural institutions who want to use this infrastructure for something lasting. Get in touch.
Tell us what you are building. We will respond within a few days.