If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to check out this exciting event the IAP2 NorCal Chapter is putting on (I’m chapter co-chair): IAP2 NorCal Event: Fixing Broke(n) Governments through Serious Games, November 17 in San Francisco

Governments around the world are all facing budget shortfalls, spending cuts and reduced services. All of us — ordinary citizens, elected officials and community leaders — know that we must make dramatic changes to solve these crises, and yet governments remain gridlocked. How do we move beyond this impasse? How do we create an approach to budgeting that is both participatory and scalable? The answer is serious games!

Join Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of the Innovation Games® Company, to learn how serious games are creating real change through encouraging public participation in government. Luke will talk about the specially designed Innovation Game® Budget Games and how it was used by the city of San Jose, CA, to bring together more than 100 community leaders and ordinary citizens to collaboratively prioritize possible cuts to the city budget.

Come prepared to participate, because we’ll also be playing a version of the Innovation Game® to get a real-world understanding of how serious games can be more effective way to get accurate and actionable data than traditional polling methods.

It’s Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 6.30pm. We’ll be back at the Citizen Space, one of San Francisco’s premier co-working spaces and fabulous community watering hole. Please see Eventbrite for details and to RSVP.

After a long period of low activity, our local IAP2 USA chapter is starting with precious little funding, so we definitely need to break even with this event. Please consider the sponsoring opportunities we’re offering. Thank you!

In preparation for this event, the chapter has started its own presence on Twitter and Facebook. Check it out!

Stephen Whitehead, researcher at London, UK-based New Economics Foundation (nef), recently alerted me to a new paper of theirs: Connected Conversations

Reflecting on nef’s decade of experience in democracy and participation, this pamphlet argues that tackling the biggest issues, from climate change to social inequality, needs to start with small conversations between friends and neighbours. By linking these small groups together we can sow the seeds for new social movements.

From the executive summary:

Meeting future challenges

The UK faces an interlinked set of economic, environmental and political challenges that have led nef to call for a ‘great transition’ – a fundamental shift to a more sustainable, socially just way of living. But transition cannot be achieved from the top down. It will require central and local government, businesses, communities and individuals to develop their own understandings of sustainability and social justice and to debate and negotiate with each other about the way forward.

At the moment, however, there is no easy way to get this kind of debate to happen. Our social fabric is fragmented, and opportunities for debate are few and far between. There is little space for groups to deliberate about complex, pressing issues and even less space for them to share their views with each other. The internet is at best a partial solution: there is no substitute for face to face discussion.

Processes such as Who Sees What offer a clue as to how problems like this can be overcome. We call this kind of approach ‘connected conversations’. Unlike many forms of public engagement, connected conversations are not about settling issues or reaching consensus. They simply let citizens engage in public discussion with friends, family or colleagues in their existing networks and then link these discussions together. Rather than seeking to generate a collective decision, they reflect that tackling the biggest issues means making many small decisions and then finding the links between them. They are, in effect, talking shops – and we are proud to describe them as such.

Democs, their process for self-facilitated small-group conversations, is outlined on the Who Sees What website:

Democs (Deliberative Meeting of Citizens) is a discussion tool developed by the New Economics Foundation to help ordinary people discover, discuss and decide about complex political issues. Democs comes in the form of a conversation kit which breaks down all the key points about a topic into discrete information cards. Players sort through the cards, choose the ones that they think are important and identify the themes that link them. At the end of the process, participants are asked how they would like policy in this area to work.

[...]

Democs ‘games’ are played by 6-8 people and take up to an hour and a half. Because all the information needed is on the cards, anyone can organise a Democs game and play it at home, at work or even down the pub! When the kit is launched this Autumn, you’ll be able to request a hard copy of the kit free of charge, or download it and print it out and run your own game. Afterwards, you can send us your results so we can include them in the survey.

Very nice! Watch this 10-minute video to see Democs in action:

Who Sees What – discussion game from Stephen Whitehead on Vimeo.

Small-group processes are essential to dialogue and deliberation, yet often neglected or underutilized online. With the first few basic elements of our small-group functionality now in place on Zilino, we can’t wait to explore and emulate some of the many different flavors of these kinds of processes, including such inspiring examples as World Cafe or Democs.

Reading up on the Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Inititative as they’ve just announced their first round of five projects to receive funding, I came across Boston, MA-based Engagement Game Lab. From their mission statement:

The Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College is devoted to forging a place for games in urban civic life.  The faculty, students, and affiliates of the lab are actively engaged in building digital games that pursue this goal, as well as researching their efficacy and effectiveness.

In a recent blog post, they make a brief mention of a previous project and their use of Second Life,which I thought was worth capturing (emphasis mine): Community PlanIt: Where We Are, Where We’re Going

In Hub2, we used the Second Life multi-user virtual environment within an urban planning process (Allston’s Library Park) to help augment stakeholders’ sense of the development area, its challenges, and its considerations. Users could walk around the environment, make suggestions, and instantly see their creations come to life. One notable feature of Hub2 was the elements of role-play incorporated into the process. For example, perhaps a resident would have to use the park as a person in a wheelchair, or as a mother walking her daughter outside the library to read. Having people “become” someone else really helped create a sense of empathy for others who would use the park.

This — the fact that one can have very real experiences in a virtual environment, either as oneself or somebody else — is one aspect about Second Life that has always fascinated me and which to this day, sadly, many nay-sayers don’t seem to fully appreciate.

On the very first day of our recent IAP2 training, we learned that empathy may be the most important tool practitioners can apply towards designing and managing public participation efforts and leading them to success. The above is a great example how immersive environments such as Second Life can support certain public participation objectives.

By the way, here’s Community PlanIt’s project blurb:

Community PlanIt is a fun, new way for stakeholders to plan for the future. It combines a mobile role-playing game with a social software platform, and is adaptable to any local planning process. Residents begin participating online weeks—or months—before the community meets for a large, live, public event. They share comments, pictures, and videos of their neighborhood and answer important questions about its future. During the event, the community plays a game, in the neighborhood, with mobile devices. After that, they leave with the tools they need to continue the dialogue.

Sounds cool. Of course, the first question that comes to my mind is: Will any of this have any real impact? What are the decisions at stake? Who are the decision makers? What level of influence do these “stakeholders” actually have? And most importantly, does the game take into account any of these questions?

Other than that, I can’t wait to try it out. We definitely need to play more with games.

Well worth watching, another video on games and gaming (and fun, and emotion, and motivation etc.): Big Think Interview with Nicole Lazzaro: A conversation with the founder and president of XEODesign

Nicole is a leading expert on emotion and fun in games. Her job over the past 20 years has been “to make games more fun” and “to make the screen more engaging.” From her bio:

Nicole was the first person to use facial expressions to measure player experiences. Through this research which she published in 2004 she discovered that people’s favorite player experiences (PX) craft emotion by offering choices in four play styles: the Hard Fun from challenge and mastery, Easy Fun from exploration and role play, Serious Fun for relaxation and real work, and People Fun from the excuse to hang out with friends. XEODesign’s PX model on emotion and games called the 4 Fun Keys inspires a wide range of creative approaches for crafting more emotions from play. With the 4 Fun Keys developers access player’s emotional response to innovate early in the development cycle where there is much less risk.

You can find more of her research on her website.

Watch the interview (about 27 minutes):

Lots to learn. Have a nice weekend!

Jane McGonigal is a leading game designer and game researcher with an interest in public problem solving. I just learned about a new game she’s been working on and which I’ll write about shortly. As a preface to my upcoming post I wanted to briefly share this video of a talk she gave at the Future of the Forum symposium in Berkeley, CA last December (which I had the great pleasure to attend): “Epic Win – Games as a Forum for the Future”

I have a feeling that game design will play a key role in developing the next generation of e-participation solutions so it’s worth paying attention.