28 IT Pro May/June 2014 P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y 1520-9202/14/$31.00 © 2014 IEEE

Mobile CoMMerCe

Bran Knowles, Mark Lochrie, Paul Coulton, and Jon Whittle, Lancaster University, UK

Encouraging people to spend locally can revive languishing economies, but circulating alternative local currencies often fails. Mobile social networking might offer a way to circumvent that approach’s problems by augmenting existing currencies with information on how the money flows.

As evidenced by the veritable explo-sion of research activity in the past decade, computing has enthusiasti-cally embraced the challenges of en-

vironmental sustainability. Still, we appear to be less convinced that we could play a role in the creation of an economically sustainable society, despite the obvious need for fresh thinking. On the macro level, high-risk and low-accountability finance helped catalyze a global recession that has left entire countries bankrupt. At a smaller scale, town centers are in a death spiral, with spending increasingly happening at out-of-town mega re-tail outlets and online stores.1

In lieu of creative technological solutions, the go-to idea for reviving local economies has been government schemes to inject vast sums of

money into languishing communities. To the ex-tent that such efforts are measurably beneficial, the benefits are often short-lived.2 Despite being an ostensibly intuitive response to the problem, adding a flood of cash to a community is unlikely to have any lasting impact unless the community has a means of capturing that wealth.

We propose that computing can have a positive influence here—namely, by providing tools that help communities capture and make the most of their wealth. To that end, we’ve designed a system that we call Barter (for mobile social networking supporting local ethical trading). Here, we discuss Barter’s conceptual development and highlight some of the technical and practical challenges we face in using it to solve the problem of capturing wealth.

Barter: A Technology Strategy for Local Wealth Generation

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Economic Sustainability: BackgroundAs the old adage notes, “information is wealth.” As we see it, the flow of wealth is actually infor-mation that mobile technologies can capture.

Leaky BucketsThe New Economics Foundation uses the meta-phor of a “leaky bucket” to describe the way in which money coming into a community leaks back out when it’s spent outside the community.2 In our globalized society, certain bucket holes are inevitable. The problem isn’t that money leaks out, but rather that it leaks out before it can per-colate through the community.

New money is created whenever profit is made on a transaction. In a completely closed system (a hole-free bucket), each transaction adds a small amount of wealth to the economy. In the opposite scenario (a bucket with no bottom at all), money coming in is immediately spent back outside the community, so a cash injection has zero economic impact. Thus, to create local economic growth, the starting pool of money in any community must be exchanged enough within that community to create more total wealth than is leaking out at any given time.

Local CurrenciesAs an alternative to the idea of improving lo-cal economies through government investment schemes, many communities are creating their own local currencies.3 Because such a currency’s value is recognized exclusively within the com-munity, it can prevent money from being spent outside the community.

Above and beyond the initial difficulties of achieving a viable threshold of businesses will-ing to accept this tender, local currencies don’t accommodate the practical need to occasionally spend outside the community. Assuming this is a key barrier to success, it raises a question: Is it possible to achieve the goal of local currencies without having to develop alternative currencies? To understand how this might be done, we de-construct modern money as an information sys-tem and show that mobile technologies can be used to enhance this information system in a way that can foster local wealth generation.

Deconstructing MoneyBecause we use money on a daily basis, we tend not to interrogate how it works. At its most basic

level, money is an information system4 that tracks “stored time,”5 enabling us to trade in it. Pre-modern money was a concretization of time that had already occurred—such as the amount of time spent laboring. In contrast, modern mon-ey represents future time, or promises of time that we make to each other.4

All information systems record information selectively, which is to say that they remember certain pieces of information and forget others.4 Although money “remembers” stored time, it doesn’t remember its own origins or its trading history (or flow). The fact that this information is forgotten is itself useful, because the primary data that the money encodes is then the value of the exchange. This makes the money fungible and “allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a mo-ment the history of conflict.”4 At the same time, the fact that money forgets the location of its origins enables spending outside of its original community, creating the possibility of holes in the metaphorical bucket. A local currency could be thought of, therefore, as an information sys-tem that remembers stored time and location.

Although money allows us to create stored time, it doesn’t accommodate another kind of time known as “flowing time.”5 The importance of flowing time is clear when we consider the fact that, if everyone hoards money, wealth can’t be generated through transactions. In this case, the pool of wealth doesn’t simply fail to grow, it ac-tually plummets as money becomes less useful. Indeed, this is often the fate of local currencies: when people struggle to find places that accept local tender, they end up unintentionally hoard-ing it, and the currency’s value nosedives.3

So, it’s actually flowing time rather than stored time that is needed to revive local economies.5 What we need, then, is a mechanism for encour-aging increased trade between people, so that a greater percentage of the money coming into a community is passed around internally before leaking out (see Figure 1).

One example of an information system that supported flowing time—and therefore helped spur the fastest and widest circulation of money in recorded history—was the grain receipts in the late Middle Ages.5 These receipts monetized grain that had been locked in “dead storage,” and thus had no tradable value.5 Because unused

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grain would eventually spoil, receipts for grain that people traded into storage lost value over time, providing a powerful incentive for people to spend money instead of hoarding it.

Similarly, in local economic transfer systems (LETS),3 the unit of money has no use other than as a means of facilitating a trade of goods or ser-vices between people.5 The fact that the economy’s balance fluctuates relative to the transactions themselves differentiates LETS from regular mon-ey because LETS are information systems that re-member stored time and flowing time (or flow).

Although remembering flow is arguably the most important feature for growing wealth, growing local wealth requires an element that remembers

location. Our Barter information system leverages the unique affordances of mobile technology and social media to generate local wealth by capturing all three elements—stored time (fixed monetary value), location, and flow—without introducing the practical complications of alternative curren-cies (for more information, see the “Increasing Currency Information” sidebar).

BarterThe Barter system is underpinned by a simple concept: if we can record the money coming in to businesses from the local community (through both business-to-business and business-to- customer transactions), we can reveal information

We have used the leaky bucket metaphor to de-scribe the theory underpinning the barter inter-

vention to generate local wealth. To understand what a technical intervention like barter actually adds to enable this wealth generation, we return to the idea of money as an information system. in our view, there’s latent potential within money to deliver information that isn’t currently being utilized.

if we consider a banknote as a currency data symbol (see Figure A), we see that most of the symbol is de-voted to protection rather than information. barter in-creases the information content of the physical money by adding an additional digital information layer to create a new physical digital currency data symbol.

extending this metaphor, the regular money’s “information rate” is limited to stored time. by

introducing various technological capabilities for capturing and representing information, barter works to increase what we might understand as money’s “transfer rate.” in other words, barter provides a new view into money—flow time, plus location—that lets more information communicated. This new view permits delivery of socially relevant information,1 which can promote alternate spending behaviors that have a long-term positive impact on local economies.

Reference1. T. erickson and W.A. Kellogg, “Social Translucence: An

Approach to Designing Systems That Support Social

Processes,” ACM Trans. Computer-Human Interaction,

vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 59–83.

Increasing Currency Information

Figure A. Increasing the information content of currencies.

Currency

Value

Time

Locatio

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Flow

Information

Protection

Barter

Physical currency data symbol

Digital/physical currency data sym

bol

Digital inform

ation

Water

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register Motio

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violet

marker Raise

d

letterin

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about the money flow within a community. We can then design a new window into the flow’s effects to motivate businesses to spend a higher proportion of this income in the local economy (see Figure 2).

Barter’s current iteration captures transaction data. Future iterations will use this information to reveal the flow of money through a test-case local economy. Our goal is for this new win-dow showing the flow to motivate new spending behaviors.

Capturing TransactionsThe ubiquity of mobile devices has facilitated novel approaches to transferring and withdraw-ing money. The use of near-field communication for contactless payments is on the rise, and new methods for performing transactions—includ-ing Square (https://squareup.com), PayPal Here (www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader), iZettle (https://www.izettle.com/gb) and, more recently, PayPal Beacon (www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/beacon)—are increasingly used in

the public domain. These systems let small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) take credit card payments where it was previously infeasible; they also let SMEs use existing commercial tech-nologies (in this case, mobile devices) and flexible communication protocols, such as Wi-Fi and 3G.

In future iterations, Barter will leverage these same tools to capture transaction data as an integral part of the transaction process. In its current devel-opment, Barter doesn’t incorporate payment tak-ing; rather, it uses Google’s Android platform and NFC cards to record transaction information as a separate (but quick) process. We also adopted bar-code scanning (including QR codes) and manual input (via the Barter website) to attract more trader participants. Barter was designed to work in both online and offline modes, storing transactions until the trader uploads them to the server, which is par-ticularly useful for traders without fixed premises.

Although Barter’s main objective is to track transactions and visualize where money is being spent around the city, we were wary of introducing yet another system on top of those that traders

Figure 1. Local wealth retention models (a) 20 percent versus (b) 80 percent wealth retention.2 Barter’s aim is to increase the percentage of money retained in the local community. The higher the percentage, the greater the wealth generated. Barter will track the baseline retention rate and motivate users to increase this percentage. For the purposes of demonstrating this effect, this model assumes a situation in which no additional money is entering the local economy from outside.

Local community money

Local business or resident income

Other communities’ money(money lost to local community)

20% wealth retention

£100

£20

£1£4

£1251.25 x growth £500

5 x growth

£.2£.16

£.3

£80 £18

£.80

£13

£20

£8

£8£26

£41

£64

£100£80

£51

£33£7

£16

£10

80% wealth retention

(a) (b)

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use for taking payments and offering loyalty re-wards. To remove this potential barrier to entry, Barter introduces a scoring system as a substitute for loyalty schemes already in existence, enabling traders to redeem points from a customer’s NFC card or barcode (in the case of student IDs). Alto-gether, the system captures a range of transaction data, including the customer ID, location, points, price, and transaction type (see Figure 3).

Revealing Flow and Motivating ChangeMobile data collection has opened up new op-portunities for recording activity history through

time and space,6 and in so doing, has affected our ability to make informed decisions. In other words, the ability to collect this data makes it possible to represent flowing time.

At the same time, social media such as Twitter and Facebook—which have popularized the send-ing and receiving of short blasts of information to one’s network—have contributed to the devel-opment of a new cultural relationship to time. In the words of media expert Douglas Rushkoff, the value of social media is “in the now,”5 the pres-ent moment. Social media is thus biased toward flowing time. Given this unique quality, a power-ful synergy might exist between social media and economic interventions intended to capture and foster money’s flow.

The advent of location-based services (LBSs) for mobile phones lets users extend status up-dates to incorporate location information. This extension was adopted by early LBSs such as Dodgeball, which popularized the term “check-in”7 to describe such an activity. Checking in has since been adopted by Foursquare, which intro-duced an online mapping technology that flows users through time and space, highlighting the places they’ve visited since joining the service.

Although using similar functionality, Barter isn’t a traditional check-in system. The system gathers data on the flow of people and their social connections to one another incidentally, as a by-product of capturing data on the flow of money between people. The important difference is that transactions-as-check-ins will vary in terms of value, and this value is what is tracked through-out the system as it grows through trade.

Furthermore, Barter is a social media only in-sofar as it provides flowing data that reflects a real-world social network—that is, a community of individuals sharing a town or city. The key “social” component, therefore, isn’t socializing it-self—such as through digitally mediated chatter—but rather the way in which the system facilitates a growing sense of connection to one’s commu-nity. By making transactional connections visible, Barter aims to increase users’ motivation to make a positive contribution to their community.

Motivating New Consumption BehaviorTo motivate new consumer behaviors, we plan to develop game-inspired interfaces and feedback systems to help users better understand the

Figure 2. The Barter concept. The Barter system encourages businesses to take the money that comes into their business from the local community and then spend it in the community.

Local community money

Local business or resident income

Motivation (Barter system)

Figure 3. The Barter mobile interface: (a) a view of the customer’s historical transaction data and accrued loyalty points, and (b) inputting new transaction data and recording the sale.

(a) (b)

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consequence of their actions,8 alongside persuasive computing paradigms, such as the Fogg Behavioral Model (FBM).9 In the FBM, B.J. Fogg defines three particular triggers for instigating behavioral change.

The first trigger is the spark, which provides the initial inspiration to change behavior. Using visualizations to show the flow of money away from the local economy, and providing feedback on the wealth generated (instead) by local trade, Barter will demonstrate the long-term impacts of spending behavior.

The next trigger is the facilitator, which makes the desired behavior easier to perform. To this end, Barter will incorporate visualizations of the local trade network and social media features (such as recommendations and message boards) to help users identify opportunities for local trade.

Finally, the signal is a trigger that identifies an appropriate time to perform a particular behavior for those already motivated. Using Barter’s maps of money flow around the city, customers will be able to identify places to spend that will increase local circulation of their money. At the same time, these visualizations will enable businesses to identify new bridges to build with other traders to keep money circulating around the network.

A wide range of applications and artistic rep-resentations exist that represent the flow of pre-viously invisible forces through a network with the goal of provoking new behavior. We draw inspiration in particular from three visualiza-tion systems: ExxonSecrets (www.exxonsecrets.org/maps.php), which maps the flow of oil com-panies’ influence throughout society as a means of fostering public awareness; massive online multiplayer games such as Ingress (www.ingress.com), which maps real-world places that players can visit to carry out activities affecting the game world; and mass-participation urban artworks such as Marling (www.haque.co.uk/ marling.php), which visualizes the impact of sounds traveling through public space.

As the development of e-commerce and m-commerce demonstrate, technology can change the way we trade money. So far, re-

search has focused on the utility of these systems—such as for payments, security, and so on—but little has been done to challenge the underlying economic models. Insofar as these systems have

affected such models, they have mostly uninten-tionally exacerbated the decline of local economies and worked to concentrate money in the hands of increasingly fewer people.4 Here, we argue that technology has the potential to play a significant role in intentionally affecting these economic mod-els to support widespread and lasting prosperity.

AcknowledgmentsThis research is made possible by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants EP/K012584/1 and EP/I033017/1. This project is a collaboration with Michael Hallam of the Ethical Small Traders Association (http://lancasteresta.org).

References 1. S. Deterding et al., “From Game Design Elements

to Gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification,’” Proc. 15th Int’l Academic MindTrek Conf.: Envisioning Future Media Environments (MindTrek ‘11), 2011, pp. 9–15.

2. T. Erickson and W.A. Kellogg, “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems That Support Social Processes,” ACM Trans. Computer-Human Inter-action, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 59–83.

3. B.J. Fogg, “A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design,” Proc. 4th Int’l Conf. Persuasive Technology, vol. 350, 2009, pp. 1–7.

4. E. Helleiner, “Think Globally, Transact Locally: Green Political Economy and the Local Curren-cy Movement,” Global Society, vol. 14, no. 1, 2000, pp. 35–51.

5. R. Hopkins, The Power of Just Doing Stuff: How Local Action Can Change the World, Green Books, 2013.

6. L. Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball,” J. Computer- Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, 2007, pp. 341–360.

7. B. Knowles et al., “Trustworthy By Design,” Proc. Conf. Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW’13), 2013, pp. 1060–1071.

8. J. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, Simon and Schuster, 2013.

9. M. Portas, The Portas Review: An Independent Review into the Future of our High Streets, UK Dept. Business, Innovation, and Skills, 2011.

10. D. Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Penguin, 2013.

11. B. Ward and J. Lewis, Plugging the Leaks: Making the Most of Every Pound that Enters Your Local Economy, New Economics Foundation, London, 2002.

Bran Knowles is a research associate at Lancaster Uni-versity and a participatory designer for the Barter Project.

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She received her PhD in Digital Innovation from Lancaster University’s HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training (high-wire.lancs.ac.uk), and her research explores the role of tech-nology in supporting various aspects of sustainability and wellbeing. Further qualifications include an MSc in Design Ethnography from the University of Dundee and a BA in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago. Contact her at b.h.knowles@lancaster.ac.uk.

Mark Lochrie is research associate on the Barter project at Lancaster University, working on the technical design and development of the system. He obtained his PhD in 2013, and his research interests relate to community participation through mobile services. Lochrie regularly participates in Hackathons and has won a number of mobile developer prizes from major companies such as Nokia and Adobe. Contact him at m.lochrie@lancaster.ac.uk.

Paul Coulton is senior lecturer in digital design in Lan-caster University’s exploratory design lab Imagination. He leads the Barter project (barterproject.org), Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy (projectcede.org), and Tak-ing the Artwork Home (@AugmentedArt). His research

interests include design of artifacts that combine the digital, and his current work also encompasses the non-entertain-ment use of “gameful design” across a range of application areas and the use of design fiction as a way of  exploring digital futures for areas such as the Internet of Things and Digital Empathy. Contact him at p.coulton@lancaster.ac.uk.

Jon Whittle is professor and chair of software engineering at the School of Computing and Communications, Lan-caster University. He also leads the Catalyst project (www.catalystproject.org.uk), which applies codesign and copro-duction techniques to develop new digital solutions to press-ing social problems. His research interests include software engineering and social computing. Whittle has been Steer-ing Committee Chair of the international software model-ing conference, MODELS. He has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship and has won the IEE Software Prize for his work in software engineering. Contact him at j.n.whittle@lancaster.ac.uk.

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