A concept for a platform to encourage engagement in public & civic services by the public. A social & engagement layer for social enterprises to tap into.

1. Actionista
An incentive platform for encouraging public
engagement for the good

2. 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.

3. We can learn from social media
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.

4. 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...

5. The idea - Actionista
We’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.

6. Badges for engagement
How badges work: Service specific badges
There are service specific
and cross services incentives. defines
Action Service
A bike journey
TfL
nes
Service specific rewards
defi
Services have their own
particular aims.
Services - like Transport for
London - can register actions (a
bike journey) and badges
Actions
= Service Specific Badge
triggered by these actions - like
the “50 Boris Bike Journeys” Actionista
Badge. Platform

7. Badges for engagement
Cross service badges
Cross service incentives
At the same time cross service, Action
more generic ‘social outcomes’ are A TfL Actionista
bike journey
defined centrally on Actionista.
‘Recycling’ for instance is then
defines
represented by the “Goody Green
Badge”.
Action Actionista
StreetCar Platform
Journey
These can be triggered by a
combination of actions done on Actions
various services.
=
Cross service
To increase their desirablility - Cross service
Some badges are very hard to get Badge
and require special or collective
action.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Thank you!
RAAK
+44 20 3286 3586
hello@wewillraakyou.com
Wessel van Rensburg - twitter.com/wildebees
Gerrie Smits - twitter.com/grrRAAK