[OLAC-credits] Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

[Kelley McGrath]

The main reason I have been holding off on more publicity is that I'm wondering if we need to do something different with the site to encourage people to keep coming back. I have not done a lot of research into crowdsourcing, but apparently a lot of the successful projects use gamification to make their tasks  more interesting. Wikipedia defines gamification as "the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification). Gamification might be too much to take on right now, especially with limited resources for development, but it is something that I'm interested in for the future.

Someone who is more familiar with these projects than I am suggested that even adding a simple counter (sort of like those fund-raising goal thermometers) would be a good motivator. I asked the developer to do something like this and he said it wouldn't be hard. Unfortunately, he just switched day jobs and doesn't have a lot of extra time so it hasn't materialized yet.

Another thing that might be helpful is allowing people to track their own contributions. The developer had initially suggested that it would be easy to set the site up so people could log in through FB, Google, etc. or even as a stand-alone. He was concerned about the potential for spam submissions (which have not materialized). By the time we got the form itself working reasonably well, I think we were both so tired of it that we were just ready to put it out there. I don't want to require a logon, but we could possibly develop it as an option. If we had user accounts, you could see how many credits you've done and I imagine it could be set up to send the kind of reminder emails that Karen would find helpful.

I am interested in this question of recruiting and retaining volunteers not just for the current project, but also because we will need people to contribute to future parts of the project on an ongoing basis, especially with interpreting the data that the computer can't handle.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Kelley
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