Smart Donations: Event-Driven Conditional Donations Using Smart Contracts On The Blockchain

Abstract

Recent work has questioned the largely unconditional nature of charitable donations and explored the value of conditional giving with contemporary donors. In this paper, we extend this work by exploring how to operationalise features of conditionality in charitable giving, situated in the context of large international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Building on prior engagements with international aid organisations, we present design considerations and a conceptual architecture supporting real-time, conditional giving for individual and institutional donations. Our architecture leverages properties of distributed-ledger technologies (DLT) to empower donors to (i) attach conditions to their donation, (ii) store funds in a secure, decentralised escrow and (iii) automatically release funds once conditions are met. Unlike prior work that envisions radical disintermediation and the removal of intermediate NGOs using DLT, our work recognises the expertise of NGOs in tackling complex global problems and instead investigates compelling new way for charities to increase transparency and accountability by introducing dynamic pledge controls. CCS Concepts: • Social and professional topics → Socio-technical systems; • Human-centered computing → Mobile computing; • Information systems → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency in Human Computer Interaction: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

“…Most publications contributing artifacts -either in the form of interface prototypes or functional systems -present systems using blockchain to implement application-specifc use cases (22 publications, e.g. conditional giving [129], energy trading [116], or last mile delivery [123]) or support tools (nine publications, e.g. visual smart contract construction [125], or tools for transaction analysis [75]).…”

“…We included functional systems (e.g. [124,129]) and interface or interaction prototypes (e.g. [9,48]) under this category and excluded physical design kits (e.g.…”

A Right Time to Give: Beyond Saving Time in Automated Conditional Donations

“…Employees of the charity felt that conditional, automated giving could attract new donors to certain causes and sought to explore new user experiences of the many different conditions that donors could set-up, not just match donor's money to a specific need. While not the only way to deploy conditional giving, blockchains offer an enhanced level of trust because they support distributed actors in transparently enforcing a set of rules and governance of each transaction [90]. Thus, subsequently we worked together to create a broad range of content to implement in a trial.…”

“…The reference architecture for Smart Donations comprises three layers: (i) A smart contract compatible blockchain, (ii) off-chain components, and (iii) and a mobile app (see: [90] for technical details). The distributed ledger, the blockchain, provides the runtime environment for smart contracts, containing the logic for the value exchange and escrow and.…”

“…If the conditions the user sets are not met by the time the contract expires funds are returned to them. Our 8-week trial of Smart Donations produced several distinct contributions, including the technical implementation [90], platform governance, interface design and the choice of data to drive donations. This paper focuses on the temporal qualities of users' experiences that emerged when automation, based on data-driven transactions, enforces their financial intentions.…”