Social entrepreneurship/SSE Game Narrative

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Evoke – Game Narrative

Draft discussion page fleshing out some details of the SSE Quest Matrix

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Evoke – to create anew, especially by means of the imagination. You live in a world with too much misery, yet alive with potential. What you see does not have to be. Some look around this world and ask why and do nothing, you see the same world and ask why not, but do something. Do something. That is your mission. Go forth into the world and act. Your challenge is to take a thought, an idea, a vision and make it real. In this journey you will be challenged with many quests and taken through many levels as your idea evolves. You however will not be able to do it alone, you will need to reach out to others for the necessary resources, tools and inspiration to accomplish your goal. While individual initiative is essential, success increasingly requires a community of minds or collective intelligence to solve a problem. Reach out to that collective intelligence and collaborate to realize the change you envision.

To begin the adventure, you will start with 50,000 platinum ZAK – the currency in this world. Along the journey you will need to make choices. The first will be to set up your venture or to join an existing venture. A series of quests will then face you. You will need to first understand your world, identify challenges that you see, create innovative solutions to these challenges and ultimately evoke the idea that will change this world.

As you go forth you will need to allocate your ZAK wisely but you will also need the confidence of other players, the power to attract others to your idea and the endurance for your venture to prosper and grow. Each of these traits will be rewarded. At the end of the journey, the venture that has accumulated the most wealth, confidence, power and endurance will be crowned champion and recognized as the organization whose ideas have the greatest power to change the world.

If you are ready for this challenge, let’s begin. Imagine. Create. Solve. Change. Evoke. Log in and start today.

Home Page

Welcome to Evoke. And congratulations for taking on the challenge of making a difference in your world. There are many ways to play this game depending on who you are and what you hope to learn, share and ultimately create through your participation. You can take on one of the following three roles:

Social Entrepreneur – You are an individual or group of individuals who either have an idea or want to go out into the world and evoke the change that you want to see. If you are a student at a university or a social entrepreneur in a community, this is the role you will most likely want to take on.

Venture Supporters – you do not want to take on the full responsibility of running a venture, but you want to help make a difference in your community. You can join an existing venture and help create or develop a project with other team members. If you are a member of an existing NGO or organization and you are hosting a team or a student at university or high school level that wants to contribute, take on this role.

Venture Advisors – You have unique experience to contribute to the development of innovative ideas. You will play the game as a mentor and leader in supporting the evolution of an idea from concept to prototype. If you are a professor, business professional, or community leader, this is the role for you.

Host Organization – You are a leader of an NGO or CBO working in a community and want to invite an entrepreneur to work with your organization to create and incubate his idea, you can advertise here and then contribute to the game as either a supporter or advisor.

Filling in your profile

Please enter a bit of information about yourself and your interests below.

Getting Started

Q1.1 Create a venture	If you decide to create your venture, you can do this alone or with a group of friends. Creating your own venture requires you to take on the responsibilities of managing your venture through the game to completion which includes completing tasks, managing team members and interacting with partner organizations and the community.
Join a venture	You can join anyone of a number of these existing ventures. Click here to see more information about these ventures and request to be a member of this team.
Advise a venture	As an advisor, you are a respected sage in Evoke. Your input and actions will have a higher value for the venture or ventures you are supporting. Your primary role will be to assess the quality of quests your team develops, provide guidance to them as their ideas evolve and suggest additional quests that you think would add value to the overall quality of the learning necessary to create a winning idea. You can join an unlimited number of teams. Your name is now available in the pool of advisors and a team may approach you to join their venture. Otherwise you can communicate directly with any of the existing ventures here.
Host an entrepreneur	As a Host Organization, you are welcoming an entrepreneur to work with your organization to develop a new idea or assist with a project you are developing. Please fill out this basic information and an entrepreneur will be contacting you in the near future. As an individual you can also become an advisor or supporter in the game.
Q1.2 Build your team.	Build your team. To accomplish all of the quests ahead of you, you will need to work with a team. Invite others to join your venture or accept those who are applying to work with you. Each employee will cost x ZAK but will potentially bring you returns through their contribution to the venture.
Q1.3 Identify your affiliate organization	Where is the community that you want to make a change? Identify the community in which you want to work by checking out the community database and then find a potential affiliate organization to develop your ideas. Email the affiliate and describe why you have chosen to work with your affiliate organization in your blog.
Q1.4 Fill in basic data on your affiliate organization	Provide the community with some basic data on your affiliate organization. Fill out as much of the data fields as you can for your affiliate organization.
Q1.5 Understand the priorities of your affiliate organization	It’s important that your idea responds to the demands of your community. Your affiliate organization is a good place to start. Interview your advisor at the affiliate and ask her to identify the top 5 priorities for change that the organization sees for your community. This should help you to orient your own thinking to meet the demands of your community.

Understanding Your Community

Q2.1 Build a community profile	In order to create an idea to assist your community, you should first understand it. How would you describe your community and its assets? For instance, you might want to consider researching the following basic data about your community: Population; Major source of employment; Sources of entertainment, Educational opportunities, Health and Sanitation, etc.
Q2.2 Map your community	Put your community on the map! Find a web mapping facility (e.g. Go to Google maps) and make a link to your community and/or affiliate organization. Add a picture if you wish.
Q2.3 Post some News	What’s happening in your community? Scan the papers on-line and share some recent news from your community.
Q2.4 Take a photo of something positive	As you walk around your community what strikes your eye? Find something that you see that evokes a positive feeling, look out for your community at its best. Post this picture in your news gallery.
Q2.5 Take a photo of something that out rages you.	As you walk around your community, what outrages you? What is it that is not right with this world and needs to be changed? Take a picture of that thing that catches your eye as something that should not be.
Q2.6 Interview a community leader	Your community is steeped in tradition and history. Your community contains individuals who are leading change and working every day to make a difference. Find that community leader and interview him or her. You can use either a pen and pencil and post as a blog or use multi media and post as a audio or video file.
Q2.7 Post community history	How did your community come to be as you see it today? It has a history, a rich set of events that has propelled it through time and molded it into the community around you. Get on the Internet and learn as much as you can about the history of your community over the past 25, 50 or 100 years. Post a blog entry of what your discover and how this history has influenced the present.
Q2.8 Include GPS position of affiliate	Where are you in the world? With today’s GPS technology you can pinpoint your exact location on the globe. Find out the GPS coordinates for your affiliate organization and include this in your dataset.

Challenge

Q3.1 Challenge description	Congratulations! You have progressed to Evoke Level 3. Now that you have a clear grasp of the assets and challenges in your community, you are now ready to define the challenge that you want to tackle or the positive asset that you want to improve upon or scale up. A useful way to clarify this challenge is to develop a problem statement. See attached link for a short introduction to problem statement development: http://www.pyli.org/downloads/Forming_a_Problem_Statement.pdf. Write a general statement about what you see as the most pressing issue to dedicate your energies. Now step back and ask the following questions: Who? When? Where? What? Why? Based on your answers, rewrite your problem statement and post it here for review.
Q3.2 MDG Link	Now that you have defined the specific challenge that you wish to focus your energies on in your community, think about how this relates to the broader challenges in your world. Go toÑ http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ and see if your challenge addresses one of these global goals for fighting world poverty by 2015.
Q3.3 Ideal Scenario	Step back and imagine. Now that you have defined the problem, imagine what should be. Create a world in your mind that matches your ideal image of the world without your problem or challenge. What would it look like? Write a blog entry, outlining how your ideal world looks. Be bold. Be imaginative.
Q3.4 What is the market for idea?	In your problem statement you identified the “who” that you will be targeting. How far reaching of an impact will your efforts make? How many individuals will a successful solution to your challenge affect in your community? In your country? In the world? Try to determine or estimate how big of an impact your efforts will make.

Solution

Q4.1 Define solution	Congratulations, you have reached level 4. It is time to define what you will actually do. While I’m sure you have had this idea eating at you through the various levels of the game, we are now at a stage to indicate what your venture is going to make or do to address the challenges or opportunities you have discovered in your community. Share what your you propose as your solution here.
Q4.2 Does it add value to an existing idea or process?	Now that you have stated what you will do, tell us more. If this is an idea that builds off of some product, service or process that already exists, tell us what is unique about this idea and how does it improve what has been done before?
Q4.3 New idea?	Now that you have stated what you will do, tell us more. Is the solution is entirely new? If so, what’s new about what you are doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make does not yet exist?
Q4.4 Why have others failed?	You are proposing an innovative idea to an intractable problem. Surley others have tried to tackle this problem and failed. Share what other solutions to this problem have been tried and are not working. List at least three approaches that have not met expectations and share your thoughts on why they have failed.
Q4.5 What do you see that others don’t?	You see the world differently. You see opportunity where others see problems. What do you understand about your idea and the challenge you are solving that others trying to solve the problem just don’t get.
Q4.6 Research what others are doing	Is your solution unique? Can you learn anything from what others are doing? Research solutions that may be implemented in other parts of the world to the problem that you are working on. List any similar solutions that you might be able to learn from and post a link to this idea or venture if a web site exists.
Q4.7 Be a broker	If you find an existing venture that is working on a solution similar to yours, how would you partner with them? What are the assets that they could bring to your venture and what value would you bring to their venture? Define how you see this partnership working?
Q4.8 Taking ideas to scale	If you are improving on an existing idea that is limited in scope, how can you take this idea and expand it to a much larger number of beneficiaries. Discuss what the current constraints are to expanding this service and how you might overcome those barriers.
Q4.9 Helping others	You may very good at finding solutions. There might be other challenges and problems in the community that are similar to yours. Scan the list of existing problems and contribute your thoughts on another companies blog as to potential solutions or provide a comment on their problem statement.
Q4.10 Using technology	The world around you is changing very rapidly. Every day new innovations and technologies are created to solve the problems we see. How would you use technology to support the implementation of your solution?
Q4.11 Prototype your idea	Can your idea be tested on a small scale. If so, begin to implement it in your community. Take notes on what works and what doesn’t. Include this learning in your final project report.

Valuation

Q5.1 Success indicators	You are ready to implement your solution. How will you know if you are successful? Define at least 5 indicators of success that will help you evaluate if your idea has had the result you hope to achieve.
Q5.2 Measurement	Now that you have defined what success looks like, how will you gather the information needed to measure that success and how often will you get the info?
Q5.3 Stakeholder success	To better understand what will define success, ask others in your community for help. Talk with your affiliate or the end users who will be the ultimate beneficiary of your idea to articulate their definition of success.

Raising Awareness

Q6.1 Make a video	You have your idea, now you have to sell it. You are trying to raise the profile of your idea and attract others to it. Put together a short video that highlights the problem you are addressing and how your solution will address the problem. Post the video on Youtube and advertise it amongst the community. If you get an advisor to sign up to your team as a result, you will earn additional points.
Q6.2 Reach out to social network site	Reach out and use your social network to let others know what you are doing in your community. Include an entry on your Facebook or MySpace site about the work you are doing to affect change in your community.
Q6.3 Branding	Do you or someone on your team have artistic talent? Create a logo for your venture that expresses who you are and what you hope to accomplish.
Q6.4 Create a web presence	Are you ready to share your idea with the world? If so, go to a free web hosting site and create your company website. Put together at least one page that highlights who you are and what you do.
Q6.5 Competitors and partners	Look out at the field of players who are working to affect change. Who are your competitors? Who are your collaborators? List at least three potential competitors and collaborators for the product or service that you are developing.

Resourcing

Q7.1 Finance	How will you fund your idea? First, you will need to better understand what your costs will be. Use the attached spreadsheet to do an estimate of the costs that you will incur to get your idea up and running. You will need to distinguish between those costs needed to get started (capital costs) and those costs needed on a regular basis to maintain your venture (recurrent costs)
Q7.2 How to make money	Does your venture have a for-profit aspect? Is there a strong market and demand for your idea? If so, how will you make money?
Q7.3 Price and Volume	If you think there is a market for your idea, what do you think clients would pay for your product or service and how many do you think would want to buy what you have to offer in your first year of operation?
Q7.4 Market for service	How will pay for what you are offering and why? Describe the main reasons why you believe this business is viable and will successfully compete against competitive products (identify your competitive advantage).
Q7.5 Not for profit	If you do not think there is a paying market for your idea or service from your end users, then you will need to think of other ways to generate income and find financing. What are your ideas for sustaining your venture?
Q7.6 Donors	Many international donors such as the Gates Foundation or Private Companies provide financing for good ideas. Which ones do you think would be interested in your idea? Provide a list of at least five donors and the reason why they would be interested in funding your idea.
Q7.7 Team	What skills do you need to make this idea flourish. Brainstorm the type of people that you will need to add to your organization and the skill that they would need to bring.
Final Outcome	Congratulations! You have finished your quests and created an incredibly unique idea. More….

Type classification: this is a game resource.