Enjoy yourself with GloBaL GAmEs 4 GoOd!

Hugging the world

For years I've been trying to teach online communication skills in Africa. What I know very well, is that time spent online here is slow, expensive, and beyond providing a new venue for Africa to beg in, it does not provide any obvious financial return. In many ways, the ourwwworld game is yet another attempt, on my part, to try and crack that nut. Is there a way that participating on the internet can be made to happen sustainably - through online income generating mechanisms - for the African participants in my wwworld? (I've been working on this puzzle for about 7 years from various angles, so bear with me. )

The basic object of the ourwwworld game is to create blog posts that include terms listed in the google hot trends, and submit the posts to digg.com to get dugg by other readers. The players with the most diggs at the end of the month win cash prizes.

An important component of the ourwwworld game is revenue sharing - in addition to a chance at prizes, each player gets part of the ad revenue generated directly by their player blog, and Life in Africa (a cause which they all have relationship with) gets 40% of all the ad revenues earned. That assumes, of course, that people like you will visit the related sites that google serves up on the player blogs. My job as moderator is to promote the players' ourwwworld content in venues beyond digg.com, so that traffic will help to increase the blogs' revenue too.

At the scheduled end of the 3 month game, the players will get to keep their high traffic blogs and all residual income, as a platform from which to launch their own financially sustainable blogs, in their own style and voice.

Seven of us have just started piloting the game - we're still learning to play and thinking about refinements to the rules, so we'll see how it goes. If you've got a comment or an idea for making the game better, you can join us in a public player discussion at ned.com. Meanwhile, here's a roundup of the most dugg plays that the ourwwworld players have submitted to digg.com so far:
See a roundup of all the plays posted so far (some of them more entertaining than these, I think) at the ourwwworld game blog.

Enjoy the diversity of perspectives!