Louise5

I’m doing a Landmark leadership program at the moment and need to work on a community project over the next 3½ months.

The project that I’ve come up with has global possibilities while still being very much local. It will be a cross between Facebook and Bartercard where people will trade babysitting sitting hours with their friends in their network. I say it’s global as I might have a group of friends in NZ and my South African friends might have their own group going in Cape Town. If I travel I could still use points or if my mum wanted, she could look after friend’s kids over there and gift me her points if she wanted to.

There are so many immigrants in NZ who don’t have a big family support network and could really do with something like this which would be more of a business transaction so they wouldn’t feel uncomfortable about asking. The more I’ve spoken to people, the more I can see benefits for a wide range of people from parents of young children to children of old parents who need full time care. Often, they can’t even leave their loved ones for a few hours to go out shopping and would love to trade hours with someone.

I’m wanting to set up a program to run via a social networking website which will keep track of points so everyone can see who’s keen to top up their hours and who needs to use them.

You’d only be using your own friends that you’ve added to your friends list rather than a random babysitting group of people so this should remove the need for security / police background checks on new members.

I was thinking of using a points system of 1 point per hour for the 1st child and then ½ a point per hour for any additional children. For night time sitting, maybe double points after 10pm and triple points after mid-night.

I want to get a website company to design the site at no charge and will put adverts on the side if the project needs financing. There will be no charge to people joining or using the service.

I hope to have this completed by the 17th Dec 2009.