e-Soccer

http://www.e-soccer.opendcn.org/

In the run up to the soccer world cup in South Africa, the Community Informatics Institute piloted a schools social networking programme focussing on soccer as a way to engage children in conversations about their community.

I worked with Mike Gurstein and Shaun Pather to implement the pilot platform in a toolset called OpenDCN – an environment really created for online deliberative governance by Fiorella de Cindio and her team at the Università degli Studi di Milano. They contributed tremendously to bend the toolset to accommodate social interaction between four teams of 12 year old soccer fanatics! (Have a look at the toolset if you are interested in participative/deliberative governance – it’s well beyond the average online forum in its support for collaborative decision making.)

The pilot was a success – though the participants were very young for this sort of thing. Lots of support from their soccer coach, as well as from interns at the school computer labs, and a structured programme of interaction, made the little network fairly busy for the pilot period.

Waiting now for full funding to kick in – it would be a real pity to leave this as a pilot only!