ByDarko Savic
How can we minimize rivalrous dynamics and maximize collaboration on online platforms?
4 years ago
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Challenge
Dragan Otasevic Jul 13, 2022
Can you come up with a system that incentivizes residents of a city to be extra friendly and helpful to others?
Image credit: Today Show
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Come up with a system that incentivizes residents of a city to be friendly and helpful to everyone. Thereby with time building a culture that makes the city known for its extreme friendliness.
6
Creative contributions
Glorify everyday kindness like you do historical figures or events
There are some cultures that are undoubtedly friendlier than others. Some are more hospitable. It lasts through generations and yet it had to start somewhere for all of them.
My belief is that if you start avidly glorify random moments of kindness, it would move the scale forever with compound interest.
How it works:
Catch random acts of kindness on camera and then choose the ones that are going to be immortalized through monuments, murals, or busts.
Literally, make a monument of someone helping an elderly get their bags into a bus. Or of a person giving money to the homeless. Don't notify the public about the type of monument that is going to be posted, organize a reveal, with ideally the person in the crowd with the help of their friends. That goes viral for sure.
It can be the peak of a massive campaign that will make everyday people into heroes:
- On sides of buildings paint murals of people standing up to the elderly or pregnant on public transportations. Of people letting someone with less groceries in front of them in the line at the store...
- Name a park/forest/street/area after a random individual that is picking up litter in it regularly.
- Comic book leaflets of a a good dead being done that get handed out to citizens on the streets. The other page is the actual person that has done it and the screenshots of them doing it. Have a note that goes something like "some of your fellow citizen of X are low-key superheroes".
- Throw a parade for the people the cameras have caught doing a good dead for a year.
I think this can be done on a governmental level, but with some resources as a civil group as well.
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City Reward System
AC
We all desire help and friendliness, even those who don't seem to be friendly and helpful. I believe a little help from someone every day, can make the world a better place and it starts with just one person.People can be helpful and friendly, especially when it is rewarding. A system that rewards helpful and friendly people with witnesses acknowledging what happened, like a proof of help concept.The system could be a Reciprocal App. The person that benefited from the show of kindness or friendliness login to the app, locate the friendly/helpful person on the app or via other social media platforms and then with a click of a button tell the world what has happened by comments, photo or videos and location. To checkmate scamming the system, the app will send a notification to people who is presumed to have witnessed the show of kindness by using algorithm to identify those at the location where the friendliness or help was rendered.When people see that their is tangible reward for being friendly/helpful. They will want to be friendly and helpful so they can be rewarded too. This might not make everyone helpful or friendly, but it will definitely turn a good number of unfriendly people to be friendly and making a city known for being friendly.The reward system as be helpful in championing sustainable cities, you can check the referenceThe reward system as be helpful in championing sustainable cities, you can check the reference below:I believe people have difficulty conceptualizing time, especially long periods likeyearsThe life calendar is generousfo have years, for
People can be helpful and friendly, especially when it is rewarding. A system that rewards helpful and friendly people with witnesses acknowledging what happened, like a proof of help concept.
The system could a Reciprocal App. The person that benefited from the show of kindness or friendliness login to the app, locate the friendly/helpful person on the app or via other social media platforms and then with a click of a button tell the world what has happened by comments, photo or videos and location. To checkmate scamming the system, the app will send a notification to people who is presumed to have witnessed the show of kindness by using algorithm to identify those at the location where the friendliness or help was rendered.
When people see that their is tangible reward for being friendly/helpful. They will want to be friendly and helpful so they can be rewarded too. This might not make everyone helpful or friendly, but it will definitely turn a good number of unfriendly people to be friendly and making a city known for being friendly.
The reward system as help champion sustainable eco-friendlyhttps cities, you can check the reference below: https://www.americancityandcounty.com/2017/07/11/incentivizing-sustainability/
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Undercover judges
I am not sure if doing good deeds for the sake of a reward is really a healthy approach, but it would probably be the most effective.
Having a system where judges are chosen at random or operate in disguise partnered with sponsors who would be able to provide a desirable reward every week, month or year could get people to start helping each other out with the hopes that someone they are helping might be an undercover judge, or that an undercover judge might be in the vicinity to witness their good deeds.
It becomes a bit of a lotto system, where someone might help everyone they encounter who is in need for a long period of time and never win and someone who might be quite an unhelpful person, in general, might win by getting lucky and being noticed the one time that they do a good deed. This, in my mind, is not a fault of the system, people will understand that more good deeds mean more chance of winning, and hopefully, people who are chasing a win end up creating such a positive environment that everyone starts buying into it.
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Create a sense of community
People are more likely to help people they know. By organizing social activities for residents of a city, the community will get to know each other better and consequently be nicer to one another.
Activities like street barbeques, meet and greets, cleanup initiatives or other events connected to the community itself are all great ways of helping people to meet and get to know their neighbours.
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Platform that engages the young-old communication, knowledge-sharing and mutual help
In short:
A service/platform that incentivises students, young people, content creators, innovators or brainstormers to create new projects, exercises, daily plans, workshops, courses, meetings, presentations or any other kind of activity that positively affects the cognitive skills of the elderly in local nursing homes, and, in the same time, enables young people to learn and apply mentioned soft skills.
The idea is described in detail here.
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Tweak school curricula to train students to be helpful
One solution would be to integrate 'helping' as a model in schools.
How?
In school, we have subjects like 'social education' where the students are expected to learn about the society. To help students realise how they can be helpful, we could make systemic changes in the curriculum and introduce the concepts of 'social projects' where the children learn and practice to be as useful as they can to strangers.
Modules can be designed that give certain assignments to students, say each week, where they have to go out in open and help people. By motivating them to do so and also making them document how they carry out the given tasks, we can over time subconsciously train them to be helpful. While the teachers guide the students, the kids need to be allowed enough freedom so that they can discover the joy and reward of kindliness by themselves.
What can be some simple tasks/assignments that we can start with?
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Darko Savic2 years ago
The class motto could be "Kindness is contagious. Pass it on."
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Add your creative contribution
General comments
Miloš Stanković2 years ago
Another idea by Darko Savic that belongs here. It's for billboards that display only ads from companies that earned exposure with good deeds.
Even though it's aimed at companies, the effect of having good deeds celebrated and rewarded would spill over to the general populace.
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
This idea by Darko Savic belongs here too I think. It's a city-run weekly lottery that rewards good deeds.
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Subash Chapagain2 years ago
I don't think you can extrinsically 'motivate' people to be nice and helpful, even more so in city settings where almost everybody is forever in a rush. If you travel to villages in Asia, you will notice that people are naturally nice and helpful to you, and they do not need any incentive to be so. It is just how the culture is. The laid-back approach to life, the connection with the natural environment, and the culture of living in groups and sharing everything make people nice for no reason.
If we want to create cities with helpful people, the first thing I would suggest is to allow more leisure and playfulness. No one will be willing to help the other when s/he is in a hurry to attend the next meeting, catch the next train, or sell the next product perpetually. The idea of incentivizing people to 'be nice' might be very short-lived and even counterproductive if these ideas clash with the existing cultures directly. Hence, a more systemic change in terms of workload, economic burden, finances etc., might be needed rather than just one or two discrete solutions.
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Florin Buda2 years ago
We have this city in my country - Cluj - that have a great university and attracts very smart and educated youngsters from the whole country.
This way a critical mass is formed and the newcomers make efforts to integrate in the smart, educated community. They buy proper clothes, read more, focus on cultural events, and yeah - act nice on each other.
Also lots of startups start here that share the culture, impose it and spread it. A nice guy that is nice 8 hours at job will be genuinely nice with the taxi driver at the end.
So at the end i subscribe to Subash Chapagain's answer: this should not be achieved by buying it but only by education + constant filtering.
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Spook Louw2 years ago
Florin Buda Subash Chapagain I agree with both of you, in that manners cannot be bought or forced. That said, education, financial stability, cultural enrichment etc. has no direct positive relationship with how nice people are to one another. By that metric, people in places like New York or London should be some of the nicest, most helpful people on earth.
Subash Chapagain I especially agree with your statement that such a change would have to be systemic and systematic. We would need to improve the general well-being of everyone, physically, mentally and financially, to be able to really influence people's attitudes toward each other.
I must include, that while this challenge will likely not offer a solution to change the world, small initiatives can have a big impact on local communities, just because we won't change the world doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about how we can incentivize local residents to be nicer.
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