[OLAC-credits] Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

[Kelley McGrath]

Thanks, Julie. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
________________________________
From: olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu [olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu] on behalf of Julie Moore [julie.renee.moore at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2014 12:11 PM
To: olac-credits at lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: Re: [OLAC-credits] Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

I think that if you could find a way to provide an incentive of some sort to those who participate, it would be helpful. I think it would be helpful for people to challenge themselves, if they could see that if they make so many submissions, you get a gold star that you can put on Facebook or whatever. People spend crazy amounts of hours playing Farmville and Candy Crush and Angry Birds ... and I think part of it is keeping an eye on the points or stars ... even if they are just virtual and have no monetary value. This is volunteer work, and just like with people who are donors, you often see levels -- a silver donor, a platinum donor, a gold donor, depending on the donations. Volunteers for libraries and museums also often receive certain kudos to strive toward for their voluntary efforts.

It's something that ultimately, the  person could maybe even put on their resume or facebook or LinkedIn account that could have meaning. Such a reward system keeps it on your radar ... when we are all so crazy busy with our day jobs and regular lives. Perhaps if there were a certain level of "cataloging star" (with stars of all colors) to be had, people might opt to do that instead of playing Candy Crush! :-)

Just a thought!

Julie Moore
Fresno State


On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Kelley McGrath <kelleym at uoregon.edu<mailto:kelleym at uoregon.edu>> wrote:
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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