A few years ago, Google very subtly introduced the Local Guides programme into their maps platform. It started off as a gamified map details crowd-sourcing project - a way to motivate Google Maps users to contribute knowledge of their locality so that everyone who passes by has up-to-date and accurate information. But it didn’t end there.
Soon it became evident to many, including me, that there is more to contributing map knowledge than just pure altruism or gamification. There is a reputation to be had. As a known contributor (dubbed Local Guide) your reviews are weightier (e.g. highlighted, and displayed before everyone else’s) and your corrections or updates to map locations are likelier to be accepted and published quicker than others’.
These perks, to name just a handful, meant that users were no longer just using maps for navigation. No - there was now proper motivation to contribute to make it an active and successful platform for modelling the world around us. That motivation being the most powerful drive of action known to man - egoism. There is nothing that motivates one like the certainty of personal reward.
Claiming that the Local Guides programme exploits one of man’s greatest vices certainly is pessimistic. However, in my mind this is the greatest possible good any crowd-sourcing platform can do. The knowledge gained from Local Guides goes straight to improving GMaps - a service almost everyone with an internet-capable device uses close to every day. And the more accurate and complete GMaps is, the more people are helped. Thus, contributing to the maps is a good thing (ignoring for the moment the motivation for doing so).
So after mapping out the entirety of the world, the problem Google faced with their maps platform was no longer an engineering one, but a social one. How do you motivate people to contribute to maps? As it unfortunately happens, altruism is not a good drive for action - certainly not for people who just want to use maps to get from A to B.
The solution to this problem - utterly ingenious in my opinion - was the Local Guides programme. Give users an egoistic motivation to be altruistic. Brilliant! Local Guides contribute and keep maps up to date, while also getting personal gratification by way of a virtual reputation. A positive sum game at its finest.
I am honoured to be part of such a virtuous programme. Even if most people don’t know or care about the social experiment the Local Guides programme is running behind the curtains, I’m proud to support such a large-scale leap of eudaimonia.