Using gamification in an online community

Abstract

Gamification has recently evolved as an approach to engage and encourage active participation of members in online communities. For an online community to start and proceed on to a sustainable operation, it is important that members are encouraged to contribute positively and frequently. This paper outlines the design and implementation of a gamification model for online communities and its instantiation for a specific online community we have developed in collaboration with a government agency to support welfare recipients transitioning to work. Besides enhancing community members' engagement, badges based gamification has offered us a way to monitor and analyse the online community, including categorising community members by the type of their contributions in the community. We present here some initial results from our online community.