Random Acts of Kindness: The Future of Digital Altruism, Community Collaboration, and Timebanks

In today's world of increasing scarcity of resources and economic stagnation, we still see rapid developments in computer science and user experience towards increasingly mobile, intelligent, and context-aware computing systems. These innovations represent a new frontier for transformative innovation on a societal level. They hold the promise of breakthroughs in how people can collaborate through dynamically coordinated, efficient, and reciprocal service transactions to improve the quality of life for all. I fix your car, you do a neighbor's taxes, she designs my new kitchen, and so on.

Organizations, which are already pursuing the goal of leveraging untapped community potential, do exist. These are known as timebanks and community exchanges, which have been around and increasing in number for quite some time. However, they have grown only slowly in relation to the need for their services. This is partly due to a lack of adequate resources devoted towards setting up and running them, as well as constraints in the design of the systems that they rely on to coordinate the transactions between community participants.

To keep up with developments in enabling technologies and even push innovation further in directions that will benefit timebanking, more intelligent and context-aware systems should be developed. These could support on-the-fly service brokering that will greatly increase the scope and efficiency of acts of reciprocal altruism. Dr. Victoria Bellotti of PARC will highlight the possibilities for today's researchers and innovators to turbocharge community collaboration by developing the required technologies. Her presentation is based upon a current research initiative, funded by the NSF, in collaboration with Professor John M. Carroll of Penn State University.

Speaker: Victoria Bellotti, PARC