Online game: contribute your ideas to fight global poverty!

My colleagues at Institute for the Future and Rockefeller Foundation are launching a fascinating and ambitious online game to crowdsource ideas on how to fight global poverty! It's a 48-hour game to cultivate back-of-the-envelope ideas for new technologies, social enterprises, skillsets, educational approaches, and other strategies or methods to help and empower poor and vulnerable populations around the globe. Sound like a huge endeavor? Yep. The game, called Catalysts For Change, kicks off on April 3 and you can sign up right now to play. Boing Boing is proud to be a media partner in this epic endeavor. From the project announcement:

Catalysts for Change will be played over a 48-hour span. It will draw players from around the world, with the goal to identify thousands of new paths out of poverty with hundreds of players from all walks of life. The game itself will leverage simple 140-character messages to play cards. Each card will capture an idea, and participants will build on one another’s ideas. By building on the cards, players will start chain reactions of innovations and solutions that are more than the sum of their parts.

On April 3, (Rockefeller Foundation president Dr. Judith) Rodin will kick off the game and initiate a conversation with leaders in international philanthropy, development, technology, design, and social innovation. Building from the real-time experiment of the Catalysts for Change game, the Bay Area forum will focus on imagining innovative ways to catalyze positive change in the lives of poor or vulnerable people throughout the world.

Ideas generated during the game and forum will be featured in an online game blog that will build on an interactive online map already offering more than six-hundred examples of innovative approaches to the issues that poor communities around the world face.

Catalysts for Change: Paths out of Poverty

• [andre paris]

  it would be nice to hear from that demographic specifically by getting One Laptop per Child in their hands

• [Jim Saul]

  Once you create a player id, there doesn’t seem to be any active login to test it, and no email activation, so I guess just check back on April 3rd?

• [Maureen McMillen Kirchner]

  We’re so happy you’ll be joining us to identify thousands of new paths out of poverty!  An email reminder will go out to all pre-registrants just prior to the game going live on the 3rd. 

• [oasisob1]

  Top-ranked idea so far: Relieve the 1% of their 99%. :-)