Cleaner and Tidier Communities using Street Tag’s Gamification (Beta)

This is a blog summary with no particular format or style intended, this summary contains an evolving new functionality on the Street Tag app. Written by Seun Oshinaike.

If you are new to Street Tag, we use digital technology to get “Every Family, Everywhere, Physically Active”. However, we recently started weaving the strands of engagement and participation into the fabric our solution. We are now transitioning into getting Families Everywhere Physically Active, ENGAGED, and PARTICIPATING in community development.

The Street Tag app is developed to motivate users to walk, cycle, or run to collect virtual tags (average value- 10 Street Tag points) which appear on the home screen map of the app. The app also helps to count steps with the use of an inbuilt pedometer or third party step tracking devices such as Fitbit. These steps are then converted to Street Tag points.

The more points that you accumulate, the faster you climb on the leaderboard with the opportunity to win some amazing prizes worth over £10,000 throughout the year. So far, thousands of families and individuals have created teams on the app, and are actively using it for regular exercise. Over half a million miles have been achieved in less than 36 months since inception, and millions of steps have been captured since the introduction of the step counter- adapted to support families exercising indoors- at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown.

In the past couple of days, we have turned on Tag Broadcast (beta version 1), another powerful feature for reporting street graffiti, fly-tipping, overflowing bins, or potholes to keep the community and surroundings clean and safe for physical activities.

We have put a lot of creativity, energy, and resources into this functionality as we are keen on adding more utility to the app. This was instigated by the drive to increase avenues to reward residents with participation points, since we already have traction with families actively walking, running, and cycling. Tag broadcast will help to augment existing physical activities experience around the community in more positive ways.

Tag Broadcasts are verified by users/residents on the app and once the broadcast is verified (authenticated), it is shared directly with designated emails of officials/ departments within a local authority that are responsible for keeping communities clean. However, this beta version 1 was turned to get some valuable feedback towards further development efforts.

Below are 3 short steps in sharing a broadcast to keep communities clean and tidy.

Residents’ participation is key in authenticating reported broadcasts, this is to ensure that only valid reports are acted on, therefore the Local Authorities officers’ time and resources are used efficiently. This phase is to get early feedback to enhance the product, therefore the reports will stay with Street Tag. Nonetheless, residents’ participation is rewarded with participation points towards their leaderboard score for prizes.

This is an example of how residents’ participation in authenticating a broadcast report works. First, all residents on a leaderboard received a notification and opened their Street Tag app to authenticate a broadcast report. If 3 or more residents thumb-down the broadcast, that means it is a hoax, and in the same way if 3 or more residents thumb-up as broadcast, that means it is valid- that will be a majority consensus and those residents will be credited with 100 participation points for authenticating the broadcast, and the residents that thumb inaccurately will be credited with zero participation points. It is in the interest of residents to authenticate accurately as each resident will not be aware of how other residents are authenticating.

To participate in authenticating a broadcast report, you can physically visit the location to thumb-up or thumb-down or you can authenticate remotely via the notification sent to your smartphone.

If the Tag is broadcasted in Barking and Dagenham, the participants on the Barking and Dagenham Leaderboard will receive the notification and can verify accordingly. (This beta version is only available in Barking and Dagenham, Basildon)

All screenshot images used in this content are all actual broadcast participation shared by residents on Sunday 6th September 2020.

Once consensus is reached with residents’ participation, and participating residents are automatically rewarded with points, the image (Fig 5) below is sent to the local authority with the picture of the broadcast, address of the broadcast, longitude, latitude, and a PDF report.

Local Authorities will be provided with access to an API that can be plugged into their legacy systems to have ‘an output call options’ for real-time reports and notification as residents participate. Further customisation will be available to local authorities on request.

Part of the Tag Broadcast roadmap is the introduction of the “litter picking” feature. This will include some form of gamification for residents’ participation while being physically active or as a means of being motivated to go out for a walk and keep the community tidy. Our belief is that residents should be rewarded for keeping the communities clean as a way of encouraging participation.

We are beginning to achieve the objective of this phase and over the weeks we hope to receive more valuable feedback.