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Gamification on the Social Web

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Social Media for Government Services

Abstract

The emergence of the social web has caused a significant movement in the way e-government initiatives are implemented and deployed. The focus of e-government has moved from delivering public services using information and communication technologies to enticing the active participation of citizens in service delivery through social web platforms, whereby people perform the role of partners rather than customers. The success of this new movement relies on the active participation and engagement of citizens on these platforms. A major question then arises: how to incentivise citizens to remain active and contribute as equal partner in the public service delivery. In recent time, gamification has emerged as a promising technique to enhance engagement, foster collaboration and induce desirable behaviour amongst people. Gamification is the use of gaming techniques in a non-gaming context. With a wide ranging application from business and marketing to social networks, health and well-being, gamification has proved to be effective in bootstrapping participation and improving collaboration amongst people while maintaining their motivation to remain engaged. Gamification could be equally valuable for government departments and agencies to incentivise citizens to engage with governments in their ever increasing presence on the social web. This chapter first provides a brief introduction on gamification and how it has been used in game dynamics. We then present our experience and observations on using gamification techniques in the public service delivery through the case study of NextStep, an online community described in Chap 9. Finally, we provide a review of some of the current popular techniques and service platforms for gamification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.seriousgames.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.nanodome.com/conundra.co.uk/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.gamesforchange.org/about/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.bunchball.com/.

  5. 5.

    http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/whatis.htm.

  6. 6.

    http://www.quirky.com/.

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  1. CSIRO Data61, Sydney, Australia

    Surya Nepal, Cecile Paris & Sanat Bista

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Correspondence to Surya Nepal .

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  1. CSIRO Data61, Marsfield, New South Wales, Australia

    Surya Nepal

  2. Services Flagship, CSIRO Data61, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Cécile Paris

  3. RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Dimitrios Georgakopoulos

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Nepal, S., Paris, C., Bista, S. (2015). Gamification on the Social Web. In: Nepal, S., Paris, C., Georgakopoulos, D. (eds) Social Media for Government Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_10

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