CivTech 6 - Challenge 6 Idea

So I just noticed that the CivTech 6 challenges have been released. https://www.civtechalliance.org/civtech-6-challenges Having a browse through I’m excited to see what the response to these will be. I’m sure I’ve read it wrong but it appears that Challenge 12 is a bit bold asking tech companies to respond to an age old data science issue. I must be reading it wrong, because in my head if you could solve that problem you absolutely do not need £25,000 and to be beholden to the Digital Directorate. They said that they had tried a labour intensive metadata process in the past, so if metadata didn’t work and you didn’t want something too labour intensive it appears you want to automate understanding the context of data across boundaries at least they limited it to just the two small data sources in Environment and Health.

I liked Challenge 6 through: https://www.civtechalliance.org/civtech-6-challenge-6-school-age-childcare

Challenge 6: How do we better understand supply and demand of school age childcare in communities?

I think it might suffer from the same issues of impossibility of dealing with multiple organisations accessing data and sharing data that challenge 12 would have though. I’d think the trajectory the challenge sponsors have laid out is a red herring. The data will be terrible to gather, static, useless, biased and every other bad adjective for data. The organisations involved will become blockers in their own right and that is before we leave the safe hands of our challenge sponsors. Remember that not even the police, social work and education can get their acts together to share data to prevent child abuse and all three organisations want to prevent child abuse.

Thinking off the cuff an knowing that I too am suggesting a difficult path, at least my path had been accomplished before with less than billions of pounds of investment. (Speaking of which how did that test and trace app work out, has it been delivered yet?) My plan would be to generate an Augmented Reality Game. Not sure of the focus or of the story yet, but there would be real world gains to be had for players. There will be real world interactions to be had, and it needs to involve some element of grinding. Where the grinding is letting the game know what you are doing before and after school in some fun fashion. So the more you are doing and the more different things you are doing are rewarded in the game, but all recorded activities are collated. Think Pokemon Go for out of school care activities.

We can then use that data to build a picture of who is doing what, where they are, and who they are with. Then like the Covid vaccine we only need a proportion of kids using this game to get an overall picture of what is going on across Scotland. The data allows us to answer the government's questions about out of school care and gives us an opportunity to build a widely used platform. Heck we could market to kids and make money through micro transactions because why not be evil on the government’s coin?

Coolness factor is building a nation wide game targeted at kids aged 10 to 16 (that’s who I’d assume would have the mobiles ready to play a game of this sort), that has real world interactions and benefits as part of it.

Wouldn’t it be neat if challenges and rewards were set by players within the game. Gaining rewards allowed the opening of different levels of play and types of interactions.

Effectively this solution looks at the problem, ignores interacting with the government in any way shape or form (other than giving them the answers they seek) and turning around to as many 10 to 16 year olds as we can and asking them to let us know what they are doing.

I don’t have the inclination to write this application up, but if someone wants to give it a wack I’m willing to help out. I enjoy any project that seeks to encourage change outside of the government. I kind of live by a mantra: If you want to see change you have to operate outside the system you want to change.