Micro-crowdfunding: Achieving a sustainable society through economic and social incentives in micro-level crowdfunding

This paper introduces a new approach, named micro-crowdfunding, for motivating people to participate in achieving a sustainable society. Increasing people's awareness of how they participate in maintaining the sustainability of common resources, such as public sinks, toilets, shelves, and office areas, is central to achieving a sustainable society. Micro-crowdfunding, as proposed in the paper, is a new type of community-based crowdsourcing architecture that is based on the crowdfunding concept and uses the local currency idea as a tool for encouraging people who live in urban environments to increase their awareness of how important it is to sustain small, common resources through their minimum efforts. Because our approach is lightweight and uses a mobile phone, people can participate in micro-crowdfunding activities with little effort anytime and anywhere. We present the basic concept of micro-crowdfunding and a prototype system. We also describe our experimental results, which show how economic and social factors are effective in facilitating micro-crowdfunding. Our results show that microcrowdfunding increases the awareness about social sustainability, and we believe that micro-crowdfunding makes it possible to motivate people for achieving a sustainable society.