Game Design for Social Innovation: Building Resilient Communities in Times of Crisis

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Covid-19 has upended all assumptions of what a resilient community looks like in the midst of a global crisis. It's not measurable by house prices or educational attainment or employment levels - it's measurable by connectedness. By the trust and reciprocity that flows between its citizens. Faced with immediate needs, strong communities have proven able to provide solutions in a distributed way, often faster and at lower cost than a centralised solution. This is because social capital, in which community interactions build trust and reciprocity, makes a community capable of organising itself, reducing the transaction costs associated with more formal coordination. And under normal conditions, connected communities have happier, less lonely citizens - with all of the positive social and economic externalities that implies.But community resilience is hard to pin down, and as a society we haven't managed to measure connectedness, never mind enable or resource it effectively. Our platform is an answer to this. It will combine the best of systems mapping, place-based analysis, game design and network theory to gather global data on how communities structure themselves - all through the lens of social capital. Citizens and practitioners will be able to create network representations of their own communities and benefit from a shared library of networks created by other users. They will be able to stage shocks and look at how resilient their particular network of connections is under challenging conditions. Ultimately they will be able to plan to adapt their real-life community in response to the learning the platform offers.The implications are profound -- enabling communities globally to build resilience to catastrophic events - not through investment in social infrastructure with its vast call on resources - but through investment in community networks and belonging. The collective intelligence gathered by the platform will provide a powerful dataset through which government, funders and change-makers can consider again how resources are allocated and interventions made -- all in pursuit of a stronger, more resilient future as we adjust to the new world that emerges.By extending the project, we will be able to build on this first phase that takes us to a soft launch in December. During the extension phase we will work closely with our Working Group to do end-to-end testing and refinement of our service and subscription models, as well as testing the business model and building our operations to scale at launch.