I think you're looking at one really good example here on ux.stackeachange.com - where players in a given space are given tools to not only add value, but to have the ranking or their value democratically monitored and adjusted by the community.
Essentially there are 3 motivations in the game space that stem from the "I'm Awesome" perspective:
- Personal Accomplishments - How awesome am I?
- Relative Accomplishments - How does my awesomeness stack up to those around me?
- Competition - Head to Head metrics between individuals and communities.
Techniques for personal accomplishments are:
- Percent completed-ness - this is where an individual needs to complete baseline requirements to reach 100% - these accomplishments can be fixed or gated for specific milestones (rankings) to show one's awesomeness to the community, or just a simple set like LinkedIn's "is my profile complete?" metric.
- Activity Counts - any number of actions performed can be tracked and assigned values, the more these actions occur, the greater the value. Some level of validation to mitigate "gaming the system" would be a good idea.
Techniques for relative accomplishments:
Present graphing elements and percentages to show the individual's performance relative to the whole, or parts of the whole that would act as an incentive to up one's game. The more important it is for that individual to be at the top of the game, the harder they will work to improve their relative performance.
Regular or intermittent updates to changes in activity in a) the community and b)individual performance relative to the community
Techniques in competition:
- Direct competition where individuals are tasked to compete for top placement. Individual or groups will work hard to prove their awesomeness and to earn the top rank recognition for how awesome they are.
- Head to Head metrics - patterns of use or activity overtime can reveal trends - these trends can be used to make head to head comparisons between individuals or groups to show +/- rankings in a given metric. If properly assigned to the desired behavior, this reporting mechanism can be used to help drive incidental competition. - As an example, one smart meter console design featured floors of a building competing for the best energy efficiency, solely based on regular reporting of their collective energy usage.
How can these methods enhance collaboration?
Given the "I'm / We're Awesome" motivation scheme and its inherent "competitiveness", you would have to use these techniques to promote collaboration. The moment one is placed in a group and metrics for success are driven by the groups achievements - individual members of the group are incentivized to co-operate/collaborate to up their collective ranking.
It's tough to fully address this in pure fundamentals. At a certain point, you have to look at specific tasks or collaboration models. I can think of a number of variables here.
In 2009, I worked with a major systems integration and management consulting firm with
globally distributed workforce of 111,000 employees world wide and 700+ active clients. The firm's Business Process Management system off custom off the shelf systems and custom applications stitched together in a .net and SharePoint portal. Our task was to design a framework for their BPM system that would not only optimize the user experience to drive efficiencies in all aspects of system based business processes, but also as a cultural touchstone for the organization. The system aimed to revolutionize how the firm leverages technology to manage operational workflow, project collaboration and delivery and knowledge management.
The basic structure of the system is profile based, meaning each individual manages a personal profile and execute tasks presented to them in their personal dashboard. The profile is outfitted with social networking hooks and role based permissions and context awareness. By this, I mean that depending on who the individual is, what they are doing, what they have done or have yet-to-do, the system will surface tasks localized to their region, office, division team, and role. Their dashboard provides them with status updates and task alerts while providing them with 100% completions, expected delivery dates and past due alerts, as well as social and business networking and content management wiki notifications. Each notification links the user directly to the specific task.
- We designed the system to help individuals manage their own required tasks, project based team collaborations as well as social and professional interactions within the organization. Using project workspaces, teams can manage project documents and artifacts, by assigning status, due date and owners. Tagging and system taxonomy provides quick access to relevant knowledge management repositories.
In this way, the system helped foster and drive internal team collaboration as well as cross organizational collaboration.
- The context awareness of the system would allows a team member from Chennai, en route to join a project site in New Jersey to view colleagues in the NJ area who may have come from the Chennai office, went to their university or shared other attributes, like previous employment, expertise, or hobbies to provide them with immediate intra-organizational networking opportunities before they arrive.
While system-based feedback cycles could be instantaneous, the user-based interactions and collaboration cycles vary based on the complexity of the task and how frequently they are responding to their individual alerts. Adding mobile alerts and severity status indicators help bring these cycles a little tighter.
A quick note on Xbox Kinect or Live
In contrast to high levels of complexity and slower feedback cycles - systems like XBOX Live and Kinect allow for real-time collaboration in gaming. There are a number of games where team mates have to co-ordinate their actions to achieve a task, whether it's moving left/right or jumping in unison to control a shared raft, or some other type activity. While a campaign might be longer in cycle, the individual tasks that require collaboration are smaller and the feedback cycles are instantaneous.
Bottom line, there is a wide range of variability in solutions to the broad topic of "Gamification in Collaborative Learning" that need to be more specifically considered on a case by case basis, which is why I tried to keep my descriptions more general and fundamental.
I'll noodle on it a little more - but the more that the individual "reputation" based accolades are derived from collaborative behavior - team contributions, team recognitions (votes etc.) the more likely you can inspire collaboration. My premise is that we're all very ego driven, even when contributing to a greater common good, one's individual recognition is still a primary motivator - which is only enhanced by a collective achievement of their respective group.
Hope this gave you some ideas. - Good luck! - J