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Knowledge Base Game

translation-knowledge-baseIn thinking about how to get games/game playing into organizations I came up with a simple idea of a Knowledge Base Game. The key is understanding your audience, purpose and context.

Game Purpose/Audience:

  • Imagine a sales force or set of experts who have extensive knowledge on how to solve problems for customers but feel that they don’t have time to contribute to a knowledge base describing the solutions.
  • Assume this set of experts primarily uses email and is also very competitive.
  • The purpose is get contributions to the knowledge base

Game description: The game is very simple, and is reminiscent of the expert questions in LinkedIn.

  • The dynamic would be to use email based polling/fill-in the blank
  • Send a question on Tuesday
  • Responses are submitted via text answer to email (form-based submission)
  • All answers are posted to a board/web page
  • A reminder is sent on Thursday to ask people to vote on the answers Friday
  • Get people to vote on the answers on Friday – crowd source the vetting process
  • The best answer is chosen by EOB Friday based on voting results – posted on board
  • Every Monday leader board results are sent out with the who won on Friday the top contributors/leaders to-date

The key will be to get support by thought leaders and influencers within the organization.  You may even want key leaders participating in the knowledge fest.

Game variations – levels of expertise

  • Depending on the dynamics of your organization, you may also want to send out multiple questions at a time – similar to the crossword of the NY Times, getting more difficult as the week progresses. This would allow for junior people to participate at the beginning of the week, and those with deeper expertise to participate at the latter part of the week.
  • This would require a more complex scoring system – weighted more heavily towards more complex questions

Acknowledge leaders

  • Recognize the leaders on a monthly basis – at the end of each month, give a prize to the best answers for that month (highest score)
  • Also give answers to the most prolific if you want (highest attempts)
  • The reward can be non-monetary or just simple recognition. Dinner with the CEO? Gift certificate for dinner? Amazon reward? It depends.

The key is start simple. Perhaps after a year, there can be multiple questions or questions for each department. See where it goes, see who answers, see where the energy is. The hardest part will be coming up with good questions. If this is a product based company, and you have a helpdesk, there may be a natural connection.

Just a simple idea to use a simple mechanism to share knowledge within the organization.

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