Social Media for Social Change

Building the Game

Posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 9:59 pm by Jeremy in process, prototype | No Comments

The SMSC team met for several hours this past Friday evening and we made some concrete progress in our quest to design a structure, a situation, a set of rules, a game that can be used to improve the nature of civil discourse within the context of social media and networked technologies. In essence, our game proposes to intertwine within the commons the participation rights of debaters — eg. their fates are interconnected — in order to build into the discourse such values as civility, reciprocity, respect, sustained engagement, and justifiable assertions. (We’re indebted to Janssen and Kies’ net-public sphere criteria.) While the details still need to be refined, the structure we have identified can accommodate several iterations that explore different social media implementations. To follow a portion of our development discussion, check out the video below:

SMSC Project Mtg - February 27, 2009