Authors:
Elisabeth Kapsammer
1
;
Birgit Pröll
1
;
Werner Retschitzegger
1
;
Wieland Schwinger
1
;
Philipp Starzer
1
;
Markus Weißenbek
1
;
Johannes Schönböck
2
and
Josef Altmann
2
Affiliations:
1
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
;
2
Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria
Keyword(s):
Volunteer Management, Blockchain-Technology, Ontology, Knowledge Management.
Abstract:
Volunteering is a vital cornerstone of our society, ranging from social care to disaster relief, being supported by a plethora of web-based volunteer management systems (VMS). These VMS primarily focus on centralized task management within non-profit organizations (NPOs), lacking means for volunteers to privately digitize and exploit their engagement assets, e.g., task accomplishments or earned competences. This may decrease engagement, since appreciation of volunteer work is the only reward available, and hinders the exploitation of engagement assets between NPOs and beyond, e.g., the education or labor market. We put volunteers in the middle of concern by investigating “how can engagement be digitized and exploited in a life-long way”. First, based on a systematic identification of requirements for a trustful digitization and exploitation of engagement assets, a web-based volunteer ecosystem relying on emerging blockchain technology is proposed. Second, for representing various kin
ds of engagement assets, a generic and adaptable ontology is put forward. Third, for establishing trust across all stakeholders, a prototypical web application is presented allowing to »blockchainify« life long volunteer engagement. Finally, the prototype applies semantic web technologies to offer a machine readable form of engagement assets in terms of Linked Data (LD).
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