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What is Kajoo
Kajoo is an open source community development platform, designed to improve interaction between citizens and their towns or cities.
It's designed to get non-activists engaged in Gov2.0: it uses gaming principles to bring people in, and to keep them in.
It's designed to encourage collaboration, not competition or blame. We know that it's not always the government fixing things, so why not include other groups in an app, or point repair companies at the areas where things need fixing.
It's designed to add Gov2.0 tools to countries with low-bandwidth, intermittent Internet connections and very strong SMS and MMS cultures.
We also want to think about how a gov2.0 tool could be used in areas affected by crises: we want to address the gap between the time when heavily labour-intensive crisis response apps like Ushahidi start to record people's day to day concerns (i.e. the rubbish starts to be collected) and gov2.0 models: we want to make it easy to transition people's concerns between these two types of system, in a way that causes minimal cognitive dissonance but recognises that services may take a little while to get back to normal too (note that this is more than just moving records from one system to another).
See the user guides for the latest set of Kajoo features and goodies.
If your city has no government services, you can use Kajoo to report what needs to be done, and start fixing your city with your neighbours, communities and aid organisations (i.e. NGOs).
If your city has traditional government services, you can use Kajoo to get more citizens engaged in the city, and shorten your council meetings by addressing stuff earlier and using maps to talk about what's left.
If your city has Gov2.0 systems (SeeClickFix, FixMyStreet), you can use Kajoo to make engaging with the city more fun.
And if you're currently using a crisis system (like Open311, Ushahidi), then we want Kajoo to give you an easier transition from crisis to running your own city.
Social benefits are listed above, but we also need to talk about money and resources.
There are financial benefits to using a community development tool: it can be used to plan out related repair work, and could reduce the cumulative costs of late repairs, highlight areas being repeatedly repaired, and potentially reduce litigation risk.
There are, as with everything, costs in this though: you need to set up the site with local maps, links to local council departments, listings for local groups etc. You'll also need to maintain and upgrade the site periodically, and if the site becomes very popular, you might also want to task someone as a community manager for it.
Game Mechanics are used to motivate user activity: users score points for identifying, voting and fixing issues, where points represent the users' civic activity. Game mechanics help make the service fun, engaging and a place users want to return and contribute to.
We'd like to build SMS and MMS versions of the Kajoo interface through a tool like FrontlineSMS or RapidSMS. We'd also like to experiment with reporting using symbol sets instead of text, so everyone, including anyone who doesn't read the languages, can highlight the things that annoy them.