The Refinement Club

Last Wednesday we had our first Pitch Night, and it was a great! There was a good vibe and interesting discussions. Åsmund Gravem presented the challenge of making something that would encourage altruistic behaviour, and we ended up with four different directions. The plan was that all the attendees could contribute their thoughts in the workroom at Facebook. Unfortunately that didn’t work so well, and that is something we need to work on until next time. So what we present here is mostly from the documentation we have from Pitch Night.

Direction 1: Environmentally approved

This direction focused on the environmental bit about being altruistic and was all about letting people brand themselves as environmentally friendly individuals, by making them work towards obtaining different achievements. Different tasks would give different points, and you would have to continuously work to keep your level of environmentally friendliness. Share, challenge and compete with your friends about being carbon neutral.

This idea is quite similar to an earlier refinement which you can find here

Direction 2: Good deeds = good stories

Celebrating the everyday hero is the core of this direction. The thought was that the state and different organizations could collaborate on rewarding people who do good deeds, and in that way encourage more people to act altruistically. Whenever you witness or is at the receiving end of a good deed you can nominate that person by adding the story to the public website (think the opposite of fmylife.com). Publishing should be extremely easy, post by sending sms, mms, e-mail, phone call, smart phone application. The readers on the site is able to rate the stories and the sites administrators also curate the stories and highlights interesting deeds. Every day a new person’s good deeds are featured and given public praise.

Direction 3: Release dead capital into circulation

Some people have more resources than they use, and other people don’t have enough. This idea is about giving people the opportunity to share what they don’t use with others. Kind of like a mix between Couchsurfers and Craig’s list. For example if you have free time to donate to people who need help with something or if you have a cabin you don’t use most of the time or you have things you’d like to give away. The system would be based on trust, but a rating system like the one on eBay or Couchsurfers would be needed to ensure trust. Community driven praise would be the main motivator.

Direction 4: I feel good, so I do good

To change people’s behavior for the better is a sensitive matter. This direction is based on the belief that if people feel good about themselves,they are more likely to have the energy to care about others. So a solution to encourage people to act in a more altruistic way, is to give them a self-development tool. A social application with game mechanics. It could e.g start with giving you a sort of personality test, which would detect areas of yourself that you’re not happy with and would like to change, and areas which you could develop further. It then helps you to set up some goals to achieve these developments, and gives you tasks to solve. If you like, you can connect to friends and challenge them/let them challenge you. When you reach your goals, you level up (and get a shareable badge) and set new goals.

So that was it for now, next Pitch Night will be a refined version of this one - we got a lot of ideas for improvements.. Please share yours!

Lastly, a big thanks to all the people who came out and contributed to our first Pitch Night!

See more pictures at The Refinement Clubs Facebook Page

Next week at The Refinement Club: Pitch Night Refined!