Date post: | 31-Oct-2014 |
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Technology |
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ActionistaAn incentive platform for encouraging public
engagement for the good
Encouraging public participation in providing civic services is a challenge
There are problems of awareness - how do people find out about your services?
It’s difficult for particular services to address these problems on their own - they need scale.
For users there are problems of recognition for their participation.
For many users it is not fun or social.
Amazing civic resources - like Wikipedia & Ushahidi - have been built through user
contributions.
People do give up their free time to do stuff for two kinds of reasons (Clay
Shirky).
Personal - they want to feel autonomous & competent.
Social - they want to feel part of a group & they have a need to share.
We can learn from social media
We can learn from games
We can make services more social and more fun.
Games have developed sophisticated ways to encourage engagement by players - by offering rewards that tick age
old evolutionary boxes, like learning, recognition, serendipity & status.
Now non game applications like Foursquare also use these incentive systems to encourage participation.
Can this be extended to encourage public action for good?
We certainly think so...
The idea - ActionistaWe’re proposing a cross-service
platform, that comprises of two parts: 1. Game-like Badges 2. Social functionality.
The aim?
To encourage repeat engagement in civic services by the largest possible
group of people.
Badges for engagement
Service specific rewards
Services have their own particular aims.
Services - like Transport for London - can register actions (a
bike journey) and badges triggered by these actions - like
the “50 Boris Bike Journeys” Badge.
TfL
A bike journey
Action Service
ActionistaPlatform
=Service Specific BadgeActions
defines
defin
es
Service specific badgesHow badges work:
There are service specific and cross services incentives.
Cross service incentives
At the same time cross service, more generic ‘social outcomes’ are defined centrally on Actionista.
‘Recycling’ for instance is then represented by the “Goody Green
Badge”.
These can be triggered by a combination of actions done on
various services.
To increase their desirablility - Some badges are very hard to get and require special or collective
action.
A TfL bike journey
ActionActionista
ActionistaPlatform
=
Cross serviceBadge
Actions
StreetCar Journey
Action
Cross service
defines
Cross service badges
Badges for engagement
Actionista is a social layer
Social: Actionista includes user profiles with a ‘Badge Bank’ for each
participating Londoner.
Users are authenticated either via Twitter or Facebook making the
Actionista system part of the social web’s fabric.
Users can publish their Actionista Badges to these platforms, and get widgets and embed codes which they can use to show off their
Badges on Platforms like Facebook or Wordpress.
Will it be used?Social enterprises, local government and charities all need
help to engage users in being active citizens.
Users don’t have to sign up every time they join a service.
Users get the recognition they crave for their contributions. It is more social. And it is fun.
Services can get a fuller picture of who their users are. The
system will have a cross service analytics back-end that all
services can tap into.
What do we need to make it
There is one unanswered question -
Who runs Actionista on a policy level - who decides service-wide badges and which kinds of services qualify?
Other than that, all we need is money to build it.
Thank you!
RAAK+44 20 3286 [email protected]
Wessel van Rensburg - twitter.com/wildebeesGerrie Smits - twitter.com/grrRAAK