Emerson College is a private college with its main campus in Boston, Massachusetts. It also maintains campuses in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California and Well, Limburg, Netherlands. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," the college offers more than three dozen degree and professional training programs specializing in the fields of arts and communication with a foundation in liberal arts studies. The college is one of the founding members of the ProArts Consortium, an association of six neighboring institutions in Boston dedicated to arts education at the collegiate level. Emerson is also notable for the college's namesake public opinion poll, Emerson College Polling.
SUNY Adirondack is a public community college in Queensbury, New York. It serves residents in Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties in New York State with over 30 academic programs of study. It was founded in 1961 as Adirondack Community College (ACC). Bachelor's and master's degree programs became available with the opening of the SUNY at Plattsburgh Queensbury Branch on the SUNY Adirondack campus. It adopted its present name on March 1, 2010.
Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to protect public values or make a change in a community. The goal of civic engagement is to address public concerns and promote the quality of the community.
M. Lee Pelton is the President and CEO of the Boston Foundation, the community foundation serving the Greater Boston area since 1915. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Pelton studied English literature at Wichita State University and Harvard University. He then held various deanship positions at Colgate University and Dartmouth College before becoming president of Willamette University (1998-2011) and Emerson College (2011-2021). On June 1, 2021, Pelton took the helm at the Boston Foundation.
Jon Radoff is an American entrepreneur, author and game designer. His work has focused on online communities, Internet media and computer games. He is CEO and co-founder of Beamable, a Live Game services platform that enables the creation of online games based on Unity.
The Bartle taxonomy of player types is a classification of video game players (gamers) based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle according to their preferred actions within the game. The classification originally described players of multiplayer online games, though now it also refers to players of single-player video games.
Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished through the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.
The MIT Center for Civic Media was a research and practical center that developed and implemented tools that supported political action and "the information needs of [civic] communities". Its mission read in part:
Badgeville, Inc. was a privately held technology company founded in 2010 with headquarters in Redwood City, California, and an additional office in New York. The firm provided software as a service (SaaS) for web sites to measure and influence user behaviour using techniques such as gamification.
Participatory Chinatown is a video game released and implemented in May 2010 to engage people in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood in the master planning process. It is a multiplayer game designed to be played in a large physical space. Players assume the role of a fictional character in the Chinatown neighborhood and they go on one of three missions: find a job, find a place to live, or find a place to socialize. In the first part of the game, players assume the role of their characters. In the second part of the game, they can act as themselves, and they are asked to prioritize values for the planning process. The players' comments and decisions are shared with decision-makers in the community to help with the development of the neighborhood.
The Philadelphia Game Lab (PGL) was a non-profit organization (501c3) to facilitate the growth and visibility of small-team development of creative technologies in the Philadelphia region. PGL created game development tools, including a toolset for the creation of audio-only games and a platform for the creation of collaborative games. Both tools were developed under a permissive MIT License. As of 2022, PGL is no longer in operation.
For project funding, Citizinvestor was a civic crowdfunding website that describes itself as a "crowdfunding and civic engagement platform for local government projects on the United States."
Gabe Zichermann is a Canadian-American author, public speaker, and businessman. He has worked as a proponent of leveraging game mechanics in business, education, and other non-entertainment platforms to increase user engagement in a process called gamification.
The gamification of learning is an educational approach that seeks to motivate students by using video game design and game elements in learning environments. The goal is to maximize enjoyment and engagement by capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning. Gamification, broadly defined, is the process of defining the elements which comprise games, make those games fun, and motivate players to continue playing, then using those same elements in a non-game context to influence behavior. In other words, gamification is the introduction of game elements into a traditionally non-game situation.
Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.
The MIT Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) was founded in 2015 by Caleb Harper as an initiative of the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project closed in April 2020 with the departure of Harper from MIT, although the closure was only officially confirmed by MIT a month later in May. The project aimed to develop controlled-environment agriculture platforms called "Food Computers" that operated on a variety of scales, and which might have been used for experimental, educational, or personal use. All of the hardware, software, and data would have been open source, with the intention of creating a standardized open platform for agricultural research and experimentation. In theory, had the project succeeded, it would have enhanced transparency in the agricultural industry and made urban agriculture easier to perform, easing access to fresh foods.
Sidewalk Labs LLC is an urban planning and infrastructure subsidiary of Google. Its stated goal is to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, and tackle issues such as cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage. The company was headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former Deputy Mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. until 2021. Other notable employees include Craig Nevill-Manning, co-founder of Google's New York office and inventor of Froogle, and Rohit Aggarwala, who served as chief policy officer of the company and is now Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection. It was originally part of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, before being absorbed into Google in 2021 following Doctoroff's departure from the company due to a suspected ALS diagnosis.
Yu-kai Chou is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, author, speaker, business consultant, and experience designer. He is one of the earliest pioneers in the industry of gamification. He has been a regular keynote speaker lecturer on Gamification at organizations like TEDx Lausanne, Stanford University, Harvard University, Google, Tesla, Lego, Huawei, Uber, Boston Consulting Group, among others. Chou is the creator of the Octalysis Framework and the Founder/CEO of the consultancy The Octalysis Group and the mentorship education platform Octalysis Prime.
Sidewalk Toronto is a cancelled urban development project proposed by Sidewalk Labs at Quayside, a waterfront area in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This project was first initiated by Waterfront Toronto in 2017 by issuing the request for proposal (RFP) on development of the Quayside area. Sidewalk Labs, which is a subsidiary of Google, won the bid in 2017. The Master Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) was created in 2019 through conversations with over 21,000 Toronto residents and aimed to be an innovative reinvention of Toronto's neglected eastern downtown waterfront.
