This platform is designed to bring users together, both locally and globally, to take positive action on causes they care about, and reward them for their efforts.
This means new versions of this platform can be launched to support multiple communities targeting multiple causes. All design decisions are taken based on creating a platform which can be used for many causes.
Core Design Considerations
- Building a highly engaged and pro-active community which evolves to more effectively achieve its underlying mission, and rewards users for contributing to the ecosystem and shared mission
Underlying Mission
- Creating connected communities centred around taking positive action on societal issues. Both locally, and globally to empower people to create change on causes they care about.
Governance and Evolving
The platform evolves and grows to more effectively achieve its underlying mission based on a reputation weighted, decentralised governance model.
Users propose, discuss and vote on changes. Guided by its community values statement, and with members who have contributed more to the mission, and thus are likely to understand the community better, having a larger influence (although it must always be a short journey to reach the top weighted rank to prevent stagnation and ego driven battles for power and control).
What is it again?!
You can consider it a user-led, incentivised, micro-volunteering, events, and meetup platform
The Two Main Routes: Local and Global
- Global focuses on combining users skills to build global projects together, and also to evolve this platform to become more efficient at achieving its stated mission
- Local is for users to meet others nearby (‘gather’) and take action together on the platform’s stated mission.
Local and Global are roughly speaking mirrors of each other as they are about collectively organising and taking action. Local invites everyone attending a gathering to help organise and grow it by promoting what they can do to help make it a success. Global is about connecting users from around the world and building larger scale projects together.
All actions which advance a platform’s main mission are incentivised to supercharge its impact on its cause, and growth.
Primary Functions of Each Route
Local:
- Users can see activities occurring near them and join in. These also tell users what they can do to help build the activity as we want to promote an engaged community of contributors rather than a passive community of followers.
- Users can see other members nearby, chat and invite them to create activities together, or to attend an activity they have posted onto the map
- Users can join, follow, and actively support people and communities creating projects activities near them
- Users should post themselves onto the map so others nearby can contact them to take action on the platform’s mission (we suggest using a local landmark fairly nearby for safety and privacy)
- Positive socially beneficial ideas can quickly reach a large audience of people locally as everyone can quickly see all free, creative gatherings to benefit the local community. Returning the power of an individual to reach a wide audience and make a difference, recreating the ability early social media had for great ideas to take off and snowball.
notes:
- the design will need to navigate showing users everything going on nearby when the platform is popular, while not putting new users off when there are not many (or any) activities nearby (or have two stages).
Global (and Meta):
- Projects:
- Users can browse positive projects targeting causes and contribute their skills/energy to building them via Micro-tasks in our Kanban/Agile boards.
- Projects are usually global, but should be implemented by local people as our platform’s underlying mission is to empower people to create change where they live.
- Tasks should be broken into small pieces which users can assign to themselves, and which return to the ‘to do’ list if not completed within two weeks, to maintain efficiency.
- Movement:
- Users can contribute to growing and running our community and movement via Micro-tasks. (often you’ll see this referred to as Micro-volunteering as we have been a volunteer community for the past 8 years).
- Users can join ‘skills’ teams so they can be @ tagged by other teams when their skills are needed for a task or discussion.
- Users can make proposals for projects or changes to the community, participate in discussions and then vote on those changes, or whether those project proposals take a space in the build queue.
- Projects being built are limited in number, expanding as the number of users grows, to keep energy focused on completing the strongest ideas, rather than starting many weaker ones.
- Personal:
- Users earn points/tokens (although much less) for completing tasks relating to their own happiness and well-being. Such as mindfulness challenges and courses.
Notes:
- there platform has voting capabilities. The voting isn’t fully developed, but the idea is that anyone can suggest an idea for a new project proposal (in ‘Projects’), and improvement to our eco-system, or something users can do to grow their personal well-being and happiness like a challenge or course (in Personal). These threads will be created via a form to allow us to keep a uniform structure, and to limit everyone to roughly one-page to keep their idea manageable for the community to read and comment on. When a space opens up in the Build list the highest currently voted project, improvement, or personal growth mission, will be moved into it for the community to create and complete tasks until it reaches a definition of done.
Governance and Ownership:
- Users will become the owner of their community and can suggest and vote on ideas new ideas for activities, projects, or for building/improving the platform. Direction is maintained by its original Community Values Statement. This governance will be grandfathered in as a community grows and its users understand the vision and mission. Initially we are operating a full-dictatorship with a plan to relinquish control to a community as members are ready to make the vision their own and protect it.
Teams, Projects, People and Communities
In the Global side are Teams and Projects.
Teams are for members who want to be taggable. So if a Web Developer needs support from a UX designer they can @UXers to call eyes onto their post. Some users won’t want to be flooded with notifications, and that’s ok. They can engage at their own speed.
In the Local are People and Communities. Existing communities with a similar vision can join the platform to take advantage of our ecosystems advanced tools to support their mission and community. People can post themselves for others to contact and arrange positive actions together to target local issues.
Design Themes
- Positive
- Energetic
- Vibrant
- Engaging
- Important
User Behaviour in UX Design
The platform is designed to create a culture of qualitative engagement, rather than maximising quantitative engagement to increase advertising revenue harvested from community members. The model today’s main social media sites have switched to wants users to click and move on, rather than engage - this comes at the expense of communities or events organisers seeking to build a community in the online world. For example, on Facebook events the event description is now hidden from users, requiring them to actively seek it out. FB doesn’t want users to slow down and read what they are actually attending or joining, and creating a participatory community in this environment is increasingly difficult. Today’s social media wants users to click, and move on as quick as possible.
Teaching community members to participate rather than just consume is going to be a challenge. Countless studies have shown attention spans of the general population have reduced constantly over the past years. This challenge is not one we shy away from, as it is a core component in our mission of increasing well-being and happiness. Creating a platform where users are an active and recognised part of our community and mission is a core concept.
Community members attending a gathering on our platform are not passive. Everyone attending is an organiser and expected to contribute, even if that is as quick as simply saying hello in the forum and sharing with their friends on other platforms. A pro-active, participatory community is essential, and that is included in our design goals to compliment the tokenisation effect, rather than rely on it solely to change users expected online behaviour.
Tokenisation
Community members are rewarded for their actions to benefit their local community, to make important societal work more accessible to everyone, and to greatly increase the velocity our platform achieves positive societal change from a local level, up. The token rewards can be earned for local actions with this process:
- A user creates a Local activity on our maps
- The user posts photos and videos to social media using our hashtags
- Our social media bot matches their photos/videos from the activity with their post on our map
- Their activity goes into a list for other users to check for abuse in return for tokens
- At the end of the current month tokens are sent into their connected wallets, unless their post was flagged for review.
You can also find more details on the current UX and design of the platform and community in our Whitepaper