Some CapitolCamp inspired wiki-thoughts:

My first session was facilitated by Karen A., who works in Senate Tech Services. Karen came with a kernel of an idea for a ‘New York State Senatepedia’…a wiki where people could explain Senate jargon, document the histories of different legal actions, and connect items with related information.

A Senatepedia has a ton of merit. It would facilitate peer-to-peer learning between private citizens. It would put in plain view the machinery of the NY Senate. It would be a living document, with articles updated over time by interested citizens (wikis that follow twists and turns can get really active). And it would be a large-scale shared archaeology project that could make visible what are today largely invisible topics, histories, and relationships. Ultimately, it would help the public follow and assess the legislature.

For those who pick up a new app every day, wikis are as basic as water, but when integrated into public processes they can have real transformative power. At the federal level, OpenCongress.org (don’t miss their wiki) offers a lot of great information. Senatepedia would be a similar – though surely not identical – venture at the New York State level. There is a lot to be said for a state legislature that would embrace such a concept and treat it as a serious resource by integrating it with the other information on NYSenate.gov.

The alternative – an edited dictionary about the Senate, produced by Senate staffers – would require a comparatively large investment, and it could become stale fast. Remember the last time you landed on a ‘More Info’ page and found a list of broken links? Yuck.

Karen’s Senatepedia idea encountered a fire-hose of input. We talked a lot about risks. I don’t know about Karen, but after all that feedback I might not have felt empowered to actually begin the project. The experience was instructive. Roadblocks and responses:

1. Moderation was a big concern. If you let the public edit your site, they will go crazy! They might lie! They might link to porn! We would need a full-time moderator!

Whoa, there. There is no incentive to contribute to a community (and a wiki is a community) if the site sponsor doesn’t value that contribution. You don’t encourage contribution by controlling the content in a top-down way, and re-editing every article is a bit silly anyway.

There are probably, say, a couple of thousand people across New York State who really care about the intricacies of the Senate’s legislative machinery. This group is a nascent community of interest. A set of people scattered across the state who may or may not know one another. These folks come across awkwardly at cocktail parties. “Well starred bills have been around since 1974, when they came about as a way to…” Total snooze at the party, but for someone, somewhere, this knowledge is powerful. The better citizens understand their government, the more they can do to help it work.

Imagine if this distributed cabal of citizen experts were set loose upon a Senatepedia, to explain and edit and debate. These are the stewards of quality and community, the people who make peace by setting the basic rules of the road (stay on topic, cite your sources, be respectful).

Wikipedia started with simple rules, and over time the site has evolved along with the community (see, for example, warning notes on controversial articles and rules on handling disputes). Those who contribute a lot gain the authority to moderate. A lively Senatepedia community would function similarly. A few passionate people can prune a large garden, making it ever easier for casual users to contribute. Ian pointed out that the smallness of the initial community is part of the point: the purpose of the wiki is to distribute knowledge more widely.

2. False legitimacy also came up. Some were concerned that visitors to the site would think of the information on the wiki as immutable, each word ‘vetted by the New York State Senate.’

This point is valid. The ‘discuss and consense’ areas of wikis are too often hidden. Most Wikipedia readers never realize that many articles are the result of an ongoing discussion that is happening elsewhere.

As a timely example, the article on the New York State Senate saw some action today due to drama, and updates to the article were not without controversy. But few people visiting the article would ever notice, unless of course they happened to click on the tiny Discussion tab.

Making the Discussion portion of a wiki more visible would reinforce the notion of the website as a living, community-created document, and it could create new incentives to contribute (both to the discussion and to the article itself). Including recent discussion or information about recent contributors in the sidebar might go a long way. Streetswiki literally ‘puts a face’ on contributors, a reminder that ‘people just like you’ wrote the articles.

Good page layout, in particular clarity about which content is wiki content, also helps avoid ‘false legitimacy.’ Clear design can remind people that the wiki is community-created and distinct from vetted Senate resources.

3. Incentives. Would people really contribute? If you frame Senatepedia the right way get #1 and #2 right, you have a pretty good shot. There are plenty of incentives to contribute to a wiki: sharing new information, correcting someone else’s infuriating mistake, seeing your name in lights, gaining virtual street cred. Latour laid out similar incentives years ago when studying publishing scientists (research funds aside), and plenty of sites reward superstar community members.

Senatepedia is a great idea, and straightforward best practices from other successful wikis could really give it legs. I hope the NY State Senate considers setting it up.

Short(er than this post, I promise) thoughts about CapitolCamp.

Harvard fellow Gene Koo wrote a thought-provoking post last week about how games can be used to bolster civic engagement and democratic participation. He noted two general ways they can be used towards these ends: games for crowdsourcing and games to determine what things people value and how they value them (value discernment).

Games for value discernment are essentially a new way of improving democratic or popular input into the governmental system. Whereas today we mostly rely on polls, lobbyists, and elections to serve as proxies for public support, Koo suggests that we might be able to use games to more subtly tease out people’s true values or more meaningfully engage them in the decision making process.

While value discernment is an interesting and noble goal, it’s the second application, games for crowdsourcing, that I’m more excited about.  The idea here is that some sort of value is produced as a direct result of the players’ actions. While playing the game you are simultaneously doing something productive. The canonical example of this is the Google Image Labeler, which shows you images and asks you to label them:

Projects like Google Image Labeler illustrate how a well-designed game can harness collective intelligence to do productive work. The small amount of work you’re doing for Google is matched by an equally small motivational reward (a score and the fun of playing). While an interest in the project’s goals might lead you to the Image Labeler in the first place, continuing participation is driven by the game, not charity.

While certainly not a new idea, I think this is an area that is largely unexplored, and I’m curious what types of problems can reasonably be solved by such games. I’ve thought about this a bit, and here’s the general criteria I’ve come up with:

This one’s obvious, but it should be stated nonetheless since it’s absolutely crucial: No matter what, there must be a strong incentive — most likely fun, but possibly something else, maybe self-satisfaction? — for the players to participate. Absent an incentive to play there’s really no point.

The incentives must align. Being more productive ought to directly align with doing better in the game, so that the players’ drive to do well in the game maps directly to whatever positive effect the game is designed to bring about.

It’s got to be robust enough to withstand nefarious players. There are always going to be at least a few people who get a kick out of trying to screw up the system, so it should take that into account whenever possible. For the image labeler, Google addressed this problem by randomly matching players up and having them act as checks against each other, making it substantially harder to game the system.

Players shouldn’t need a lot of context. Put another way, the barrier to entry has to be really, really low. Again, the image labeler stands up well: You don’t need any context to start playing, just look at an image and start typing what pops into your head. And each round is only two minutes, so you can participate without committing a substantial portion of your time.

The problem should lend itself incremental contributions. If it’s an all or nothing affair, it’s tough to get people to participate. Best of all would be an app that allows a gradual ramping up of participation, so if people do get really jazzed about it there’s a clear path forward.

There are of course several challenges and pitfalls here. Many games seem to be fun for a bit, but eventually the novelty wears off and people stop playing them. How sustainable could this really be? (One idea I’ve had is that the scope of the problem could be limited in such a way as to have a  relatively fixed end point, but that’s not really a solution to the core problem.)

Another challenge I see is related to what Ian wrote about in Voting Sucks (or: what is constructive involvement?). Many easy and quick types of interaction can only nominally be called “participation,” and it’s hard to call them meaningful. But I think this may in fact highlight the beauty of this idea: If the game is designed well enough, it might actually become a positive outlet for what would otherwise be useless or even negative behavior. Again, this may or may not be practical, but history and human nature do indicate that people like to vent and express their outrage at things; why not try to harness some of this for good?

One idea I’ve had, which is admittedly half-baked, is a game for predicting bus arrival times. It’s become abundantly clear that there’s a need for better information about when buses are actually going to show up. What if there were a game that rewarded people for accurately predicting when a certain bus line would arrive at a destination? You would also presumably need either a disincentive to providing inaccurate information, or at least a check against it. This could also take advantage of people’s frustration; bus arrival information is most useful when the arrival times differ substantially from the scheduled times. This is also when people are most likely to be frustrated. Imagine if we could leverage the energy people put into Twittering about how annoyed they are that their bus is stuck in traffic (I know I’ve done this) and direct it towards a more positive outcome?

What problems do you think could be solved by games?