Post in Myabodo

Apr 18 11:44 UTC

Hi Ella (and all),

Don't panic!  You'll be pleased to know we Delib folk are still on
this list...

I can indeed say a bit more about My Abodo: we developed the game last
year as part of Defra's Climate Challenge Fund initiative.  We ran the
game campaign over several months last year -- it's winding down now,
though we'll likely keep it online for a while yet.  To date, we've
had 127,780 total views of the main game from 97,205 unique visitors
coming from 1,960 referrers; there have been 29,930 personalised
abodos made.

We think that's pretty good going (we hope people might, at some
point, start putting higher expectations on themselves in terms of
reach in this sort of field -- thinking in terms of 10s or 100s of
thousands, rather than just 10s or 100s).  However, there were two
aspects in particular we were really pleased with: firstly, the
sharing element of the game/toy.  We built My Abodo with the intention
of people customising their abodo as a kind of self-expression
exercise and then sharing their abodo with their friends or audience.
To that end, when you make an abodo, you're given a bit of code to
allow you to embed a mini-abodo widget in your site or blog (see our
example at http://www.delib.co.uk/dblog/myabodo-takes-off).  As people
started doing this, My Abodo was disseminated throughout the extended
network of our original audience and slowly but surely this actually
became the principal way of experiencing the game -- to date, we've
had 143,735 unique views of embedded widgets and for the latter half
of the campaign I think the widgets have overtaken the central site in
terms of daily views.  We think this is a good model!

Secondly, we've been pleased with the level and nature of comments
that people have submitted with their abodos; the number of facetious
or malicious comments has been relatively low and the number, and
nature, of comments that show people have really engaged with the game
has been particularly encouraging.  People had so many intelligent
critiques, suggestions, opinions and alternatives on the topic that
it's just a shame it wasn't feasible for the project to get the
audience directly conversing and debating with one another.

Hope that's helpful; if people want to make use of My Abodo, they can
link to the game at http://www.myabodo.com/ or, even better, go and
make their own abodo and widgetise it.

Thanks,

Ben

Ben Whitnall | e-Democracy Consultant | Delib
http://www.delib.co.uk
Bristol & London | UK | 0845 638 1848 | +44 117 316 9508

Catch the latest e-democracy news and comment: http://www.delib.co.uk/dblog

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