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 3586hello@wewillraakyou.com

Wessel van Rensburg - twitter.com/wildebeesGerrie Smits - twitter.com/grrRAAK