A specialised social network software architecture for efficient household water use management

Abstract

Specialised, or vertical, social networks (SSN) are emerging as a useful tool to address practical issues such as household water use management. Despite the perceived benefits, the design of such systems is still not fully aware of the social interactions or the incentives that could be used to change user’s behaviours when engaging with the network and peers. In this work, we propose and demonstrate the software architecture of a social network aimed at the efficient management of water in households, defining and connecting specialised system components. Three aspects are relevant in this work: first, the architecture explicitly defines components that support social interactions, in the context of existing water management instruments. Second, the architecture defines components addressing openness, which enable easy communication with external resources. Third, as part of a gamification ecosystem, universal and transferable rewards are proposed to incentivise the expected online and offline behaviours.