Two weeks ago we talked to Katarzyną Batko-Tołuć, the board member of the Citizens Network Watchdog Poland about the project sprawdzamyjakjest.pl. that has recently been launched. Gerere Foundation, experts in gamification, helped them design the tool. Jacek Siadkowski – president of the Gerere Foundation talked about the creation process of the new tool and  how to get the community involved in action.

Filip Żyro: – How was the gamification designed by Gerere in sprawdzamyjakjest.pl? What is this component for anyway?

Jacek Siadkowski: – Gamification has a simple task – to make the arduous browsing of very similar documents cool and motivating. It’s easier said than done but contrary to popular belief it’s not enough to give points to people to make them do their tasks more willingly, and gamification  does not always need to be based on competition.

Good gamification must  respond to motivation and  motivational needs of the  recipients.

We always start the gamification design process  with intense Design Sprint.We spend five days on mapping our goals,  studying our target group, building a commitment strategy (for example,  how long we want to engage the players for, if we want them to compete or work together, etc.), inventing a concept and test it with future players.

With sprawdzamyjakjest.pl the early design phase was very demanding – because the research quickly showed that the target group with greatest potential is… Wykopowicze (users of Wykop.pl). People with large amount of energy to control the authorities, who like games, very concentrated when using their computers. But also people belonging to a certain subculture that we needed to get to.

First concept of the game was very extended. We thought that the advanced tree mechanic for the character development will give  players a lot of possibilities to prove themselves.The tests quickly showed that we were mistaken. Wykopowicze said that the mechanics are interesting but they give them a feeling of being manipulated – they would rather be rewarded for their effort and not motivated with a carrot.

That is why we decided to focus on a few key mechanics answering the most important motivational insights from our research. All players agree that they need to feel that they are a part of a strong community, they like collecting achievements, being appreciated, and that is why we have decided to bet on mechanics that distinguish most committed players: funny badges and a narrative of dogs in glasses known from famous internet memes.

The implementation worked. In exchange of their involvement in analyzing the documents, players get a fast feedback showing their score and compliance with the answers of the other players. When they reach the compliance levels, they are granted rewarding badges, such as „Fast as bull terrier” and a mention of their role on the website in secion “Masters and Mistresses of the Campaign”. Besides, we engage in regular dialogue with them about how to expand the project, for example it is them who chose the name and a logo for the project.

This is very interesting but these super simple mechanics really draw people in, and on their journey for the highest badge, some of them can check over one hundred documents within a day – almost all done correctly.

Today, after interviewing the users, we know that we should expand the gamification with wisely built rankings and the possibility to browse the documents from a specific region.

Implementation coming soon!

How do you check if the obtained data is reliable?

– We are lucky to have great specialists working with us. In case of  „Sprawdzamy Jak Jest”(We check the facts) we used a backend crowdsourcing engine built and developed by Wojtek Włodarczyk and Dagmara Dziedzic.The engine was built for scientific research in the area of Natural Language Processing and effectiveness of e-learning processes. Similar technologies are used by big companies, like Amazon, to get the data used for training of artificial intelligence. The difference between us and Amazon is, that in Amazon, people perform their tasks for money, and for us,thanks to gamification,they do it for free.

The engine developed by Wojtek and Dagmara, in simplified terms, compares the answers of the users, and by using special statistical algorithm (for example compatibility measurement) it assesses the consistency between users’ answers. If three people choose the same answer, then we know that the data is correct,but if each user chooses different answer, then the question goes to advanced analysis – now seven people answer that question. If most of them agree, we have a match. But if the problem persists the document is sent for the expert evaluation done by the team of Watchdog Poland.

The engine is currently evolving and in near future, the algorithm will take user trust level into account. It means it will give a higher importance level to the answers of the users who browsed  lots of documents correctly.

You can tell sprawdzamyjakjest.pl wants the community to get involved in the project. What is Your idea for active stance of  citizens who are internet users?

– For six years we engage people in social work on the internet. We accomplished several nationwide projects, which allowed us to come to a very clear conclusion.

Co-creating and co-development of gamification with the community increases its involvement multiple times

Before we started to work on our project, we researched our target group, who assesed what motivates people more to act for others.The most common answer was that they get turned on by being a part of a strong community who has an influence on reality.

Game development circles are an example for us. Game Developers engage fans on early stages of the development – they show them first artworks, they consult characters appearance, they show them gameplay videos.Thanks to all that they spice things up,and create fan community, before the game is even ready. We want to achieve the same with sprawdzamyjakjest.pl.

And finally there is an obvious upside – bigger community means more users, more involved community means more users with experience in analizing documents. Because of that we aquire more and more valuable data.

Source: Sektor 3.0

Published thanks to Sektor 3.0. Sektor 3.0 is an endeavor of Polish-American Freedom Foundation. Its realization has been entrusted to specialists from Foundation for the Development of Information Society. Text on the licence CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 PL.

Pro bono translation by Dariusz Wiśniewski.