Mizuki Sakamoto, Waseda University (presenter)
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University
This paper proposes a new social media infrastructure, named micro-crowdfunding, for motivating people to participate in improving our society. Increasing people’s awareness of how they participate in solving serious social problems is central to achieving a sustainable society. Micro-crowdfunding is a new type of community-based crowdsourcing architecture that is based on the micro-level crowdfunding concept and designs the values as a tool for encouraging busy people who live in urban environments to increase their awareness of the importance of participating in activities to improve society through minimal efforts. Because our approach is lightweight and uses a mobile phone, people can participate in micro-crowdfunding activities with little effort anytime and anywhere.
After introducing the basic concept of micro-crowdfunding, three scenarios are demonstrated to show the effectiveness of this new social media infrastructure. The first scenario adopts virtual currency, and its basic operation is similar to that of traditional crowdfunding. We analyze how the current design described in the scenarios influences participants in micro-crowdfunding activities and show some pitfalls of the design that cause problems when some users do not find the service valuable. We then present two more scenarios to improve upon the first scenario. The second scenario incorporates virtuality, and the third scenario incorporates fictionality to enhance micro-crowdfunding activities. These scenarios adopt popular strategies used in games to increase people’s motivation to participate in more micro-crowdfunding activities. We also analyze how the enhancements influence participants’ behavior in the scenarios. Finally, we describe experiences with using a real working prototype system to validate the scenario-based analysis.
