The goal of Social Hours is to make it easy for social organisations to credit volunteers for the hours of labour they have donated.
Social Hours uses a distributed architecture based on the complementary currency system groupcash. Each coin represents an amount of hours volunteered for a social organisation. Using encryption and digital signatures, the hours are independent of a central database and therefore can be freely exchanged between compatible systems.
The first version consists of a web application that provides the following capabilities
An account is created by providing an email address for authentication and optionally a name. A public/private key pair is generated to identify the account.
A social Organisation registers with its name and the email address of the administrator for authentication. A public/private key pair is generated for digital signatures.
The administrator of an organisation can authorize an account to be able to credit social hours in the name of the organisation.
Creditors can credit a number of social hours to volunteers by providing a description of the work done and the name or email address the account was created with.
Account holders can see the history and current balance of social hours credited to them.
Creditors can see how many social hours an organisation has credited to which accounts.
Users of the application (administrator, creditors, accounts) can log-in by providing their email address to which a unique link is sent. The user can choose to stay logged-in indefinitely or until the browser window is closed.
Teminates the user session.
Dorji and Sonam just founded a social organisation to support tree planting in their community. They install Social Hours on http://hours.greenerthimphu.bt.
As a first step they choose Register Organisation, enter Greener Thimphu as the name and [email protected] as the email address of the administrator. After registration, Dorji receives an email containing a link to log-in.
On her computer, Sonam selects Create Account and enters her email address [email protected] to which a log-in link is sent as well.
After logging-in, Dorji can grant Sonam the right to credit hours by selecting Authorize Creditor and selecting Sonam's name or email address.
Karma hears about "Greener Thimphu" and wants to volunteer at the tree planting day they are organising, so she goes to http://hours.greenerthimphu.bt and selects Create Account.
Karma brings her friend Sangay along with her to the tree planting day. After four hours of planting trees, they go to Sonam and ask her for four social hours. Sonam logs into the application, selects Credit Hours, enters 4 hours as well as Tree Planting as the description and selects Karma's email address. Since Sangay does not have an account yet, Karma can create one for her on the spot and credits four social hours to her as well.
Both are notified about the credited social hours via email and go home with the good feeling of having done something useful.