The uHelp Application

When people need help with day-to-day tasks they turn to family, friends or neighbours to help them out. Finding someone to help out can be a stressful waste of time. Despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in combating such daily irritations. uHelp provides a platform for building a community of helpful people and supports them in finding help for day-to-day tasks. uHelp uses electronic institutions to coordinate interactions between individuals, and it relies on a trio of techniques—semantic similarity, a trust model and a flooding algorithm—to help efficiently find the most trusted volunteers for a given task request. This chapter provides an overview of the uHelp application, describes its underlying electronic institution, and presents a brief introduction to the integrated technologies that allow uHelp to effectively find the most suitable volunteers.