ABSTRACT
WhatsApp, as the world's most popular messaging application, offers significant opportunities for improving the reach and effectiveness of engagement projects. In collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) we designed WhatFutures, a collaborative future forecasting engagement for global youth using WhatsApp. WhatFutures was successfully deployed with 487 players across 5 countries (Kenya, Bulgaria, Finland, Australia and Hong Kong) to inform strategic change within the IFRC. Based on our analysis of the activity - including 16,100 messages, 95 multimedia artifacts, and a post-engagement survey - we present a reflection upon the design decisions underpinning WhatFutures and identify how decisions made around group structures, processes and externalization of outputs influenced engagement and data quality. We conclude with the wider implications of our findings for the design of engagements that best utilize the affordances of existing messaging applications.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
Corrigendum to "WhatFutures: Designing Large-Scale Engagements on WhatsApp", by Lambton-Howard, et al., CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Amazon. 2018. Amazon Comprehend. https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/Google Scholar
- Michael Baker, Université Lumiè re Lyon F, Richard Joiner, and David Traum. 1999. The Role of Grounding in Collaborative Learning Tasks. Collaborative learning: Cognitive and computational approaches (1999), 63.Google Scholar
- J Biggs and K. F. Collis. 1982. Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy. 13 pages.Google Scholar
- Elizabeth Bonsignore, Vicki Moulder, Carman Neustaedter, Derek Hansen, Kari Kraus, and Allison Druin. 2014. Design Tactics for Authentic Interactive Fiction: Insights from Alternate Reality Game Designers. Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '14 February 2016 (2014), 947--950. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dan Bouhnik and Mor Deshen. 2014. WhatsApp Goes to School: Mobile Instant Messaging between Teachers and Students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, Vol. 13 (2014), 217--231.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hanna Celina, Clement Lee, Patrick Olivier, and Ahmed Kharrufa. 2018. LearningCircle. io : Lessons Learned from Organising Courses with and without a Dedicated Platform. The Learning Circle platform : from idea to implementation .Google Scholar
- Justin Cheng and Michael S Bernstein. 2014. Catalyst: Triggering Collective Action with Thresholds. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14) (2014), 1211--1221. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West. 2006. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. 373 pages.Google Scholar
- Elizabeth G Cohen and Rachel A. Lotan. 2014. Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom. Vol. 2nd. Teachers College Press, NY. 202 pages.Google Scholar
- D.L. De Vries and R.E. Slavin. 1978. Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT): Review of Ten Classroom Experiments. Journal of Research and Development in Education,, Vol. 12(1) (1978), 28--38.Google Scholar
- Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke. 2011. From game design elements to gamefulness. Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments - MindTrek '11 (2011), 9--11. arxiv: ACM 978--1--4503-0816--8/11/09 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oswald Devisch, Alenka Poplin, and Simona Sofronie. 2016. The Gamification of Civic Participation: Two Experiments in Improving the Skills of Citizens to Reflect Collectively on Spatial Issues. Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 732, June (2016), 1--22.Google Scholar
- Andrea Forte, Niki Kittur, Vanessa Larco, and H Zhu. 2012. Coordination and beyond: social functions of groups in open content production. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2012), 417--426. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rosemary Garris and Robert Ahlers. 2002. Games, Motivation, and Learning: A Research and Practice Model. Simulation and Gaming, Vol. 33, 4 (2002), 441--467.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James Paul Gee. 2003. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Computers in Entertainment, Vol. 1, 1 (2003), 20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eric Gordon and Jessica Baldwin-Philippi. 2014. Playful civic learning: Enabling reflection and lateral trust in game-based public participation. International Journal of Communication, Vol. 8, 1 (2014), 759--786.Google Scholar
- Eric Gordon, Stephen Walter, and Pablo Suarez. 2016. Engagement Games: a case for designing games to facilliate real-world action ., bibinfonumpages27 pages.Google Scholar
- Hellmann's. {n. d.}. WhatsCook. http://cubo.cc/whatscook/Google Scholar
- Nassim JafariNaimi and Eric M Meyers. 2015. Collective Intelligence or Group Think? Engaging Participation Patterns in World without Oil. Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15 (2015), 1872--1881. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N JafariNaimi, E M Meyers, and A Trumble. 2014. Designing meaningful participation: Analyzing contribution patterns in an alternate reality game. Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (2014), 306--309. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jesse Schell. 2014. The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses .AK Peters/CRC Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson. 1999. Making cooperative learning work. Theory Into Practice, Vol. 38, 2 (1999), 67--73.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Paul Kariuki and Lizzy Oluwatoyin Ofusori. 2017. WhatsApp-Operated Stokvels Promoting Youth Entrepreneurship in Durban, South Africa. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance - ICEGOV '17 (2017), 253--259. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jeffrey Y Kim, Jonathan P Allen, and Elan Lee. 2008. ALTERNATE REALITY GAMING. (cover story). Commun. ACM, Vol. 51, 2 (2008), 36--42. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sunyoung Kim, Jennifer Mankoff, and Eric Paulos. 2013. Sensr. Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '13 (2013), 1453.Google Scholar
- Aniket Kittur. 2010. Crowdsourcing, collaboration and creativity. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, Vol. 17, 2 (2010), 22. Google ScholarDigital Library
- a Kittur, J Nickerson, and M Bernstein. 2013. The Future of Crowd Work. Proc. CSCW '13 (2013), 1--17. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shirlee-Ann Knight and Janice Burn. 2005. Developing a framework for assessing information quality on the World Wide Web. Informing Science Journal, Vol. 8, 3 (2005), 159 -- 172.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Edith Law, Andrea Wiggins, Mary L Gray, and Alex Williams. 2017. Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research : Implications of Uncertainty. (2017), 1544--1561. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Haley MacLeod, Ben Jelen, Annu Prabhakar, Lora Oehlberg, Katie Siek, and Kay Connelly. 2017. Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) for Researching Distributed Populations. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology, Vol. 3, 11 (2017), 152898.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Haley MacLeod, Kim Oakes, Danika Geisler, Kay Connelly, and Katie Siek. 2015. Rare World: Towards Technology for Rare Diseases. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15 (2015), 1145--1154. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juan F Maestre, Haley Macleod, Ciabhan L Connelly, Julia C Dunbar, Jordan Beck, Katie A Siek, and Patrick C Shih. 2018. Defining Through Expansion : Conducting Asynchronous Remote Communities ( ARC ) Research with Stigmatized Groups. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI'18 (2018), 1--13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jane McGonigal. 2011. Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. (2011). Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. L. Morgan. 1997. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Sage Publications (1997), 32--46.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lizzy Oluwatoyin Ofusori and Paul Kariuki. 2017. The Power of WhatsApp as a Communication Tool for Elections Observation and Monitoring in KwaZulu-Natal. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance - ICEGOV '17 (2017), 536--537. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tamara Peyton, Alyson L. Young, and Wayne Lutters. 2013. Playing with leadership and expertise. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '13 (2013), 715. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yusuf Pisan. 2007. My guild, my people: role of guilds in massively multiplayer online games. Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment (2007), 20. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1367976 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Annu Sible Prabhakar, Lucia Guerra-Reyes, Vanessa M. Kleinschmidt, Ben Jelen, Haley MacLeod, Kay Connelly, and Katie A. Siek. 2017. Investigating the Suitability of the Asynchronous, Remote, Community-based Method for Pregnant and New Mothers. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17 (2017), 4924--4934. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pybossa. 2018. Pybossa. https://pybossa.com/Google Scholar
- Katharina Reinecke, Ann Arbor, and Krzysztof Z Gajos. 2015. LabintheWild : Conducting Large-Scale Online Experiments With Uncompensated Samples. Cscw (2015), 1364--1378. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniela Retelny, Sé bastien Robaszkiewicz, Alexandra To, Walter S. Lasecki, Jay Patel, Negar Rahmati, Tulsee Doshi, Melissa Valentine, and Michael S. Bernstein. 2014. Expert crowdsourcing with flash teams. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '14. 75--85. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katie Salen. 1995. The Ecology of Games. Communication Theory, Vol. 13, 3 (1995).Google Scholar
- Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, Vol. 2004 (2003), 688. Google ScholarDigital Library
- AF Seay, William J Jerome, Kevin Sang Lee, and Robert E Kraut. 2004. Project Massive: A Study of Online Gaming Communities. Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors and computing systems - CHI '04 (2004), 1421. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ethan Seltzer and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2013. Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities for Planning. Journal of Planning Literature, Vol. 28, 1 (2013), 3--18.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amy Soller. 2007. Supporting Social Interaction in an Intelligent Collaborative Learning System. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Vol. 12 (2007), 40--62.Google Scholar
- Statista. {n. d.}. Most Popular Mobile Messaging Apps Worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global-mobile-messenger-apps/Google Scholar
- Besiki Stvilia, Les Gasser, Michael B. Twidale, and Linda C. Smith. 2007. A framework for information quality assessment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyJASIST, Vol. 58, 12 (2007), 1720--1733. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ajay Sura. {n. d.}. In a first, court to send summons via WhatsApp. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/in-a-first-court-to-send-summons-via-whatsapp/articleshow/58074835.cmsGoogle Scholar
- K Toyama. 2011. Technology as amplifier in international development. Proceedings of the 2011 iConference on - iConference '11 (2011), 75--82. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zach Waggoner. 2009. My avatar, my self : identity in video role-playing games. McFarland & Company, Jefferson. 201 pages.Google Scholar
- Alyson Young, Tamara Peyton, and Wayne Lutters. 2013. Understanding Situated Action in Ludic Ecologies. Proc. Intl. Conf. on Communities and Technologies (C&T) (2013), 100--109. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- WhatFutures: Designing Large-Scale Engagements on WhatsApp
Recommendations
Everyday dwelling with WhatsApp
CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computingIn this paper, we present a study of WhatsApp, an instant messaging smartphone application. Through our interviews with participants, we develop anthopologist Tim Ingold's notion of dwelling, and discuss how use of WhatsApp is constitutive of a felt-...
Caught in the Network: The Impact of WhatsApp’s 2021 Privacy Policy Update on Users’ Messaging App Ecosystems
CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsIn January 2021, WhatsApp announced an update to their privacy policy, sparking an outcry that saw millions of users install other messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal. This presented a rare opportunity to study users’ experiences when trying to ...
WeGovNow: A Map Based Platform to Engage the Local Civic Society
WWW '18: Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018In this paper we describe the advancement of WeGovNow, an Horizon 2020 European Union project involving twelve partners from Germany, Sweden, Greece, Italy and United Kingdom, aimed at using state-of-the-art digital technologies in community engagement ...
Comments