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Guide

Overview

The WOM Platform recognizes the value of actions having a positive effect on society and provides tools to reward their positive externalities. These rewards are provided by external entities of the platform, called Merchants, who freely acknowledge the value of work and actions performed through recognized Instruments.

Platform entities

The WOM Platform is based on the following entities:

  • The Registry: central entity performing voucher generation and processing payments. The Registry keeps track of other recognized entities and keeps track of vouchers, in order to prevent forgery or double-spending. The main Registry is offered as a central service by DIGIT srl.

  • Instruments: external entity that allows users to perform and to validate socially valuable contributions. Each ‘minute’ of work performed through a recognized instrument can be converted into WOM vouchers, which are released by the Registry on behalf of the Instrument.

  • Merchant: external entity that allows users to monetize the WOM vouchers they collected, rewarding them with goods and services. A merchant is registered by the Registry and issues ‘payments’ that are completed by voiding existing vouchers.

  • Point of Service: technical end-point managed by the Merchant that allows it to issue payments and to collect vouchers.

Components of the platform

Each entity of the platform is composed of server-side and client-side software elements, as shown in the following figure.

Components under the Rewarding Platform component are provided by the central WOM Platform installation and are readily available (including the central Registry and the WOM Pocket application for users).

Implementing and integrating an Instrument (which is usually based on a custom work collection and aggregation tool) requires the approval by the platform’s ethical committee and custom software integration using WOM connectors.

Adopting the WOM Platform as a Merchant requires a registration on the platform’s Registry. The following forms of integration are possible:

  • The easiest one relies on the WOM POS application (Google Play and App Store), that can be freely download from application stores. Once logged in, you can manage the Points of Sale of your Merchant and easily setup payments.

  • More complex setups with Merchants involving a software back-end (for instance online shops) require custom integration using a WOM connector. Easy to use connectors for major e-shop platforms are under development.

Papers

  • L. C. Klopfenstein, S. Delpriori, A. Aldini, and A. Bogliolo, ‘Introducing a flexible rewarding platform for mobile crowd-sensing applications’, in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, Athens, 2018, pp. 728–733. doi: 10.1109/PERCOMW.2018.8480323.
  • L. C. Klopfenstein, S. Delpriori, A. Aldini, and A. Bogliolo, ‘“Worth one minute”: An anonymous rewarding platform for crowd-sensing systems’, Journal of Communications and Networks, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 509–520, Oct. 2019, doi: 10.1109/JCN.2019.000051.