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Unequal Time for Unequal Value: Implications of Differing Motivations for Participation in Timebanking

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Timebanking is a service-based community currency, built on the principle that everyone's time is valued equally. It has potential for community building and reenergizing neighborhoods, but it faces several adoption challenges. We report on the largest investigation of timebanking practices to date by analyzing a combination of service exchange records from the three largest hOurworld timebanks with over 3,500 members with 33,000 completed service exchanges, and a survey of 446 members of over 120 hOurworld timebanks. Our findings suggest that the ideal of 'equal time, equal value' that is at the foundation of timebanking is a source of tension between members with instrumental versus idealistic and altruistic motivations. We suggest that future peer-to-peer systems must incorporate different rewards and incentives in order to accommodate users with different motivations.

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  1. Unequal Time for Unequal Value: Implications of Differing Motivations for Participation in Timebanking

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. community currency
    2. peer-to-peer service exchange
    3. timebanking
    4. use and adoption challenges.

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    • National Science Foundation IIS Small
    • National Science Foundation IIS Medium

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    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    • (2024)Understanding the determinants of member participation intentions in web-based time banking platforms: role of perceived trust and perceived riskBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2336610(1-17)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2024
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