Terms of Engagement: Engaging Web Communities through Gamification
The Web is an excellent environment to create communities that can share knowledge of specific interests. However people will not share knowledge if they are not properly motivated to engage.
Gamification methods can help engaging people to share knowledge in a way that is pleasent for them and beneficial for the whole community.
This webinar covered several aspects of how apply gamification methods to engage communities to share knowledge and grow at a fast pace.
Attendees of this webinar learned the following:
- How communities work
- Turning website visitors into regular community members
- Common artifacts to build website communities
SPEAKER
Manuel
Manuel works as a software developer, an activity that he started since he was 13. In the 80s he developed computer games with a couple of friends, for which he earned some notoriety in Portugal.
In 1998, he released a book named “Being on the Internet” published by McGraw-Hill Portugal and in 1999, Manuel started a website called PHP Classes with the purpose to distribute web programming components written in the PHP language. This is a site owned by his company Icontem on which he has been working exclusively since 2001.
Thanks to the extensive use of gamification techniques since the beginning in 1999, the PHP Classes site reached near 1.2 million registered users. Over 3400 of those users are contributors of the site that shared thousands of useful components for the benefit of the whole site community. The site uses its own platform to implement gamification techniques, as well to monitor the results of the initiatives to increasingly engage more users.
Since 2009 Manuel Lemos also collaborates with Google as Top Contributor of the Google AdSense product, which implicitly uses gamification principles to motivate the most active users of the Google product forums.