Community PlanIt
Community PlanIt is an online engagement platform for local planning efforts. Bringing together the interactivity of social networks and the incentives of online games, Community PlanIt transforms participatory planning into a fun, engaging activity for all ages.
Users participate online in several weeks of planning-themed missions and earn points after completing various activities, achieving certain accomplishments, and actively participating in discussions of the issues the community faces. Over time, these points are converted into player-defined value blocks. Players endow these blocks with a community value important to them (such as environmental sustainability) and then stack these on top of each other to form structures in a Valuescape—a visual model in the mold of a cityscape that displays a folksonomy of the community’s values (with the most important values designated by the highest value structures).
The community joins together at the end of the process in an interactive face-to-face meet-up to discuss the results, listen to the governmental and organizational response, and plan for the future.
In each implementation, Community PlanIt will:
- Teach players about important planning issues facing their community
- Allow players to problem-solve and dialogue with other residents to find solutions
- Enable players to send feedback and local knowledge directly to decision-makers
- Strengthen community bonds and build capacity
- Push players to challenge others to complete community-improving tasks
- Increase the perception of agency and social capital among a diverse range of community stakeholders
Community PlanIt’s curation system allows each community to design a custom game tailored to its own planning issues. Decision-makers can also upload and display important documents on the system, allowing Community PlanIt to serve as a hub for information sharing, as well as a record of community preferences and feedback.
Go to project development blog
Go to project website
Funded by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Director & Principle Investigator: Eric Gordon, EGL
Project Manager: Stephen Walter, EGL
Graphic Designers: Nerissa Cooney and Alex Hage, Golden Arrows Design
Front-End Developer: Yuan Ma
Back-End Developer: Philip Kalinsky
EGL Student Employees: Brittney Oswald, J Chia, and Stephen Hewitt
Community Partners:
