Implementing 'degrees of trust' in Community Weaver

I posted this in my blog a few weeks ago but since this seems like a good place to put this I figured I'd share it. I didn't edit this so remember I wrote this for a non-timebanking literate audience.
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Time Banking epiphany of the day

Before I get to the heart of this letter let me make a few definitions and updates so people have some idea of what I’m writing about here.

Time Banking - A Time Bank is a alternative to cash, where 1 hour of my time is worth 1 hour of someone elses time. For example I can spent 5 hours making a website for someone and then spend those hours getting someone to do some carpentry in our house or housesitting/dogsitting for us when we’re travelling. You can read more about this at http://www.timebanks.org/

I’ve been a member and a ‘kitchen cabinet’ member (which means I’m one of the advisory board) of my local Time Bank, the Downeast Time Bank (http://www.downeasttimebank.org/). We’ve been trying to figure out why we haven’t gotten more members and why things seem to be rather stagnant. I know personally that I’m not comfortable asking someone I don’t know to do something so thus I really only use the Time Bank with friends that I would have probably asked favors of anyways. So what does it take to get people to use this model? It’s a neat idea but it’s not catching on.

So this morning, while driving into work this morning my geeky mind started merging my current day internet/web social networking experience with the Time Bank model and I came up with this epiphany. Time Banking needs a ’social’ networking model implementing ‘degrees of trust’ along the lines of what is used on LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbaya). For example, I want to be able to mark the people I trust/know in the Time Bank as my 1st degree contacts, and their direct contacts would be my 2nd degree. I could mark my requests or offers to only be offered to those I know/trust personally (1st Degree), or to folks they know/trust (2nd degree). I think any further degrees out than that is a bit silly, the next level out would be ‘everyone’.

Along these lines I’ve also been pushing for our Time Bank to implement some ‘neighborhoods’ where you could basically trust a group for your offers/requests, for example I could mark my offer/request so it’s only visible to anyone who is part of my church or other non-profit organization. The same 1st Degree / 2nd Degree trust could be extended there, in that I trust any organization that members of the local Unitarian Church trust etc.

The argument against this idea is it ‘fractures’ the time bank, but if people aren’t using it as is, and they would in the fractured model, then hey.. they are using it, this is a good thing imho. You either swim & grow or you stagnate. Things seem to be stagnant right now, something needs to change.

The question is, will the folks writing the timebank organization software, Community Weaver (http://community.timebanks.org), ‘get this’ idea and actually implement it? All I can do is write this and send it around, the idea will either sink or swim. Here’s hoping this idea is a swimmer, I think this is what needs to happen to get this to catch on more.

-Matt

Matt, you've touched on a very interesting topic and one that we have debated many times and will deliberate on in the future.

Manisha - Thank you for responding to my note. I am glad to hear that this has been discussed in the past. While I understand the reasoning on not setting this up, I believe that different timebanks have different needs and thus I am of the opinion that this option should be added to community weaver so that Timebanks that wish to do this have that option.

While I understand that the timebank coordinator has 'vetted' all the members of my timebank, I am still hesitant to have a stranger come take care of my dogs while I am away &/or do work in my house. Meeting someone at an open house is still not enough for me to trust them with too much. I am admittedly a computer geek and thus not the most social of creatures, but I don't think I am alone in this.

It's my opinion that having this feature would enable some people / groups to start using the timebank within their more closed circles and that from that they would start using the larger timebank also. You need to make people feel comfortable using the timebank and if having this 'degrees of trust' setup does that then I think it should be an option.

Along these lines while I see there are new neighborhood features in the latest Community Weaver software. I've only skimmed it so far but I havent seen any way to limit my offers/requests to certain Neighborhoods and thus this feature isn't particularly helpful for Timebanks that cover a large geographic area like the Downeast Timebank.

Again, I'm not saying these features would fit all timebanks and I certainly understand why some, perhaps most, wouldn't use this feature. I do know that our Timebank wants this and without it we are trying to do rather confusing work arounds.

Thanks for your time.

-Matt
Downeast Timebank
http://downeasttimebank.org/

Hi Matt
Everything you wrote about trust made a ton of sense.If we don't know someone, then we don't have a source of information to go on, and so it makes sense not to have a lot of trust. Just to be responsible for our own well-being, we need to give and get and accurately read "you can trust me" signals. Time Banking is intended to create greater trust. If the Time Bank is working well on that front, members will trust the Time Bank, even if they don't know the Time Bank member they are going to make an exchange with.

That makes it very important to establish the Time Bank's trustworthiness and also to signal the trustworthiness of the membership to new members in ways that help them to jump in quickly. Experienced Time Bank coordinators are really aware of that. And there are some coordinators who just understand it, intuitively.

I think that one of the most cherished aspect of many coordinators' work is the way in which they build that trust. And many work very, very hard at it. The more the Time Bank is able to be the holder of trust, the stronger it becomes. And the individual members can rely on its reputation, and not have to do the kind of worrying about "degrees of trust" that you wrote about.

It would be great to ask different Time Bank coordinators and the members in those Time Banks: What do you do to signal to new members that they can jump in and trust that it's going to work for them -- even with complete strangers? It would also be great to get a sense of how much responsibility the coordinator feels for that -- and what they do to make sure that the responsibility comes to be carried more by the whole membership.

Your question is a great one, and is really thought provoking. A lot of the meaningfulness of Time Banking hinges on how well and how powerfully it creates a sense of trust between people who don't know each other well, if at all. I think that we all yearn to be trusting. What makes people really passionate about Time Banking is their experience of coming into a world with a different kind of trust built into it.

Chris