No abstract

Gamification, the idea of inserting game dynamics into portals or social networks, has recently evolved as an approach to encourage active participation 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. We decided to introduce gamification in an online community that we designed and developed with the Australian Government's Department of Human Services to support welfare recipients transitioning from one payment to another. We first defined a formal model of gamification and a gamification design process. In instantiating our model to the online community, we realised that our context applied a number of constraints on the gamification elements that could be introduced. In this paper, we outline the design and implementation of a gamification model for online communities and its instantiation into our context, with its specific requirements. While we cannot comment on the success of gamification to drive user engagement in our context (for lack of the possibility of a controlled experiment), we found our implementation of badges-based gamification a helpful way to provide a useful abstraction on the life of the community, providing feedback enabling us to monitor and analyze the community. We thus show how feedback provided by such gamification data has a potential to be useful to community providers to better understand the community needs and addressing them appropriately to maintain a level of engagement in the community.

It is widely acknowledged that obesity is a serious health issue. Despite governments' campaigns and initiatives to raise the level of awareness, the proportion of adults classified as overweight or obese is increasing steadily. As a result, there has been a growing interest in Human Computer Interaction and User Modelling to study how to support health behaviour change. While most of the work to date has focused on individuals, medical research has shown that family engagement plays an important role on health behaviour. To consider the family context, we are developing technology that facilitates health discussions and encourages supportive behaviour within the family. We investigate how to motivate members of a family to reflect upon their lifestyle and think of ways in which they can make it healthier. In particular, we have looked at whether providing explicit goals and tailored feedback can have an impact. During a two week trial with families in which we explored these strategies, we found that setting a collective goal for the family influenced how much the family as a whole contributed, and that feedback increased significantly mothers' participation. Our results also suggest that establishing a family goal encouraged families to work together and, in particular, to help each other find ways to be healthier. Finally, 76% of participants reported discussing the task with someone in their family, and, also discussing it together as a family (57%).

Engagement with computer games causes children and adolescent users to spend a substantial amount of time at sedentary game playing activity. We hypothesise that this engagement can be leveraged to motivate users to increase their amount of physical activity. In this paper, we present a novel approach for designing computer games, according to which the users' physical activity reinforces their game character. This way the users are seamlessly motivated to perform physical activity while maintaining their enjoyment of playing the game. General TermsDesign, Human Factors.

With the emergence and rapid growth of Social Media, a number of government departments in several countries have embraced Social Media as a privilege channel to interact with their constituency. We are exploring, in collaboration with the Australian Department of Human Services, the possibility to exploit the potential of social networks to support specific groups of citizens. To this end, we have developed Next Step, an online community to help people currently receiving welfare payments find a job and become financially self-sufficient. In this paper, we explore some ethical issues that arise when governments engage directly with citizens, in particular with communities in difficult situations, and when researchers are involved. We describe some of the challenges we faced and how we addressed them. Our work highlights the complexity of the problem, when an online community involves a government department and a welfare recipient group with a dependency relationship with that department. It becomes a balancing act, with the need to ensure privacy of the community members whilst still fulfilling the government's legal responsibilities. While difficult, these issues must be addressed if governments are to engage with their citizens using Social Media.

To work effectively in information-rich environments, knowledge workers must be able to distil the most appropriate information from the deluge of information available to them. This is difficult to do manually. Natural language engineers can support these workers by developing information delivery tools, but because of the wide variety of contexts in which information is acquired and delivered, these tools have tended to be domain-specific, ad hoc solutions that are hard to generalise. This paper discusses Myriad, a platform that generalises the integration of sets of resources to a variety of information delivery contexts. Myriad provides resources from natural language generation for discourse planning as well as a service-based architecture for data access. The nature of Myriad's resources is driven by engineering concerns. It focuses on resources that reason about and generate from coarse-grained units of information, likely to be provided by existing information sources, and it supports the integration of pipe-lined planning and template mechanisms. The platform is illustrated in the context of three information delivery applications and is evaluated with respect to its utility.

No abstract

No abstract