shepherd gov20 la 2012
DESCRIPTION
my presentation this morning at the Gov 2.0 LA conference (at Pepperdine Univ.), topic: "The Invisible Hand of Politics: Engagement with Government through Technology and Gamification." Kind of a rebel take on the normal slant...TRANSCRIPT
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Engagement with Government through Technology & Gamification
Lewis Shepherd
[email protected]@lewisshepherd
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The phenomenon, not the word
Commenter "Neil" on a blogpost about the trend/buzzword “gamification”, Oct. 14 2010:
"I really hate the word itself. The suffix is twice as long as the root! A lexical disaster."
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Gamification derives from a game-designer approach, “game mechanics”
• Rules-based• Attempt to architect optimal behavior
& activity, through scoring• Multiple layers of feedback-loops and
positive/negative reinforcement; Maslow!
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In Enterprise settings…
• traditional approach extended to enterprise use: BlueShield, Coca-Cola, hundreds of others
• just as used in software games, extended to software companies:–Microsoft, SAP, IBM
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In Government settings…• Attempts to apply term &
concepts to government have often followed that enterprise model – – “behavioral economics”
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“Nudging” from the top
• Top-down, authoritative, prescriptive • Author Ian Bogost has written:– "Gamification is Bullshit" – It’s "exploitationware" designed to manipulate
and lie, in age-old ways.– Extrapolated to government, runs counter to Tim
O’Reilly’s original expression of Government 2.0 as a Platform
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TJ letter about the kind of government where "every man … feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day."
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Taking the reins which citizens already hold
What about understanding & extending the democratic, bottom-up paradigm?
Instead of government incenting citizens, citizens incent government… and those who want to govern.
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Citizen scoring of optimal behavior by government entities/representatives
• In political campaigns: already active in implicit ways – Debate participation: 2012, 27 Republican primary
debates– Tracking polls– No different from counting your Facebook "Likes" –
the same exultation • How many of us admit to posting something
(photo, book reference) primarily to shape your external reputation or image?
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“Gaming the System”
• Pandering politicians!– The more babies you kiss, the more votes you
earn– The Larry Sabato rule of "How to work a room"
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What are the analogues for citizen-government implementation of traditional Gamification techniques?
• Incentives/Rewards• Competition• Progress Feedback• Goal hierarchies
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Executive government
• Federal level (i.e. President)• Local (e.g. mayors of San Jose, San Francisco)
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Legislative government
• National/local blend within a representative republic; tie to the constituent (voter=scorer)
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Judicial government
• Citations• 5-4 vs 9-0 counts• appeal/overturns statistics (9th Circuit)• Laughs per term!
• Oddity of lifetime appointment; results?
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Judicial government
• Traditional critique demands televised sessions– Public commentary on Affordable Care Act
(Obamacare)– Electrified national debate
• But little feedback loop on government via TV– Argentine model instead– Positive/negative reinforcement on court actions
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One traditional critique of Gamification
• "Difference is, life is hard, real world can't be gamified"– Success is easily structured/designed for the
gamer, and achieved by the gamer– Real world success is heavily random and hard
• In traditional government use of Gamification (topdown), same thing– only used in tangential areas (the public urinal)
because of complexity, difficulty
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More promise in bottom-up citizen-government gamification• Complexity is inherent and a central part of
the response• "Finger on the pulse of the nation"
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What would explicit supportive actions to encourage Bottom-Up Gamification be?
• Using gaming mechanics to make the citizen-control-of-government a more compelling experience
• Explicit rewards– Until now, largely financial; • Lincoln Bedroom sales; • Ambassadorial appointments; • Solyndra
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Using technology for government gamification from below• Social network sites– Direct engagement with politicians on Twitter– Politicians/Agencies keeping track of Twitter
follower numbers, Facebook likes
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Recognize distinction from actual Gaming world between 3 types of games
• PvP, competitive player games (global leaderboards, etc.)– This is where much enterprise "gamification" has focused; ranking,
badges etc• Single-player games (challenge scales to evolving/learned skill
of the user)– This is where small-ball government "gamification" has focused
(social steering)• Cooperative multiplayer games (MMOGs)
– Gamification mechanics require deep understanding of the social interactions within the system
Among these 3, I'm talking about “Cooperative multiplayer democracy”
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The Invisible Hand of Politics
• Adam Smith on "invisible hand" controlling macroeconomics– Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, called
Smith's Invisible Hand "the possibility of cooperation without coercion"
• Macropolitics controls Government; the hot breath of the people – The Founding Fathers were game designers, particularly at
the Constitutional Convention– Constitutional Amendments are merely game versions.
We're now up to “version XXVII.0”
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We need many more game mechanics for democratic control of government
• something that rivals "big-donor reward system,” for the hot breath of the people– Already the system responds – usually – to
incentives like • GDP growth• Unemployment rate• Murder/Crime rates
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“Politics is a good thing.”
popularized by Prof. Larry Sabato, University of Virginia
Followup:
[email protected]@lewisshepherd
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Engagement with Government through Technology & Gamification