Social Ch@nge

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

What? You’ve never heard of her?

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, and she wrote the world’s first computer programs for the Analytical Machine, a device invented by Charles Babbage.  Women’s contributions to tech aren’t talked about enough – today is aimed at changing that. You can read more about Ada Lovelace Day and its organiser Suw Charman-Anderson, as well as join the challenge yourself here.

To participate, today we’re telling you about a woman who made a huge difference to the way we think about non-profits and the internet.

Ok, we know we talk (rave) about Jane McGonigal all the time. She’s a self described game designer, futurist and games researcher.  MIT Tech review pegged her as one of 35 innovators changing the world for her groundbreaking work in alternate reality gaming.

The reason we think she’s so fascinating for people working on technology and non-profits? Because she creates games that motivate people to take a stake in them and work together on solving the game. She motivates people to tell stories. And she’s into being playful for the sake of playful (she was one of the organisers for the San Francisco flashmobs) but she recognises the power that play has to change the way we think… and she’s using that power for good.

I used to worry that games like the one’s she’s worked on were too addictive – she’s designed games that were so immersive, people had trouble  distinguishing the game from reality (think I Love Bees, or The Beast).  I wondered who had time to play these kinds of games. I was freaked out by the hive-mind aspect – I knew that groups of players had proved collectively smart enough to solve problems her team had estimated would take a month to solve in just one day.

But then I thought about the implications these characteristics have for social change on the internet. Getting people to pay attention to a problem without being overwhelmed by it, and motivating them to work together on a solution are the keys to changing the way we handle problems.  And Jane is working hard on developing this angle: you can check out her recent projects that had an explicit social change edge at World Without Oil (where players pretended we’d hit peak oil – and then survived without it) as well as the non-profit game  Superstruct (a future predicting game that played with the idea of using grassroots solutions to solve big problems).  I have a feeling Ada and Jane would have gotten along very well – check out the other women who are changing technology at the FindingAda mashup here, and keep tracking Ada Lovelace day as it moves around the world!