Like many city, state and national governments, the City of San Jose, CA, is facing a significant 2011 - 2012 budget deficit. In this post on how Innovation Games® can be used in to engage citizens and improve democratic processes, I'm outlining our plans for a specially designed Buy a Feature game that The Innovation Games® Company will be producing for approximately 100 San Jose neighborhood community leaders on Jan 29, 2011. My hope is that community leaders, motivated citizens and public service employees will find inspiration and ideas that they can leverage to create effective and meaningful conversations about the issues that shape our lives. I also compare our approach to other games and puzzles that have been created to address similar problems, such as the NY Times Budget Puzzle, the LA Times California Budget Balancer and the Next10 Budget Challenge. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our respective approaches, we can choose the approach that is most likely to produce actionable results.

Big Budget Deficits Are Big Problems
I'm not the right person to argue for or against the various reasons that our governments have incurred such big deficits. The reality is that we've got them. And we have to deal with them. Which sounds easy. But we all know it isn't.

Balancing San Jose's budget will be a tense, arduous task that will involve significant negotiations between often competing interests of many constituents. Sacrifices and tough choices will likely rule the day.
 

This month the Hot Devz Blog has done my work for me and profiled our developer Santiaga Zavala. Santiago, along with CTO Dan O'Leary, is responsible for development of our iPad game Knowsy, including a white-label version that's testing now, and Innovation Games Online, our online game platform. Read on to learn more about our own "Hot Dev".

Santiago Zavala: Creative Developer behind Knowsy

Like an elegant diver, he jumps right into the ever-floating opportunities of life. He is not afraid to jump, even if the dive

Santiago Zavala, Developer, The Innovation Games® Company

is sky high. Since childhood, he has made courageous decisions and acted autonomously. In fact, like his favorite Star Wars characters, he tends to add adventurous nuances to whatever he does. In his 20s and he already has accumulated an impressive track record of creative self-started projects, such as enterprise social networks, online communities and cofounding the Super Happy Dev House in Mexico. "It's all about creating," he says as he intensely looks at the latest game app that he developed for the iPad. "Being a hacker and an entrepreneur has always been in my blood."

Click here to read more.
 

It's important to write a "good" email invitation letter for your online games -- one that includes all the essential information needed for your players to access and play the game. Our default invitation letter includes tags that auto-populate the letter with game information like player name, planner name and the game link. However, most of our game producers and facilitators often tailor the invitation. Here are some tips on how to make successful edits, along with an explanation of tags and which ones must be included in the invitation.
 

First, let's review with the default invitation letter for a Buy a Feature game:

Dear %name%,

%plannername% has invited you to play the Innovation Game® %gametype% to better understand what you're looking for in future products and services.
 

To play the game, click on the link below. This link will open a website that will present you with a list of features. Each feature costs a certain amount of money. You will be given some money to spend on the features that you want to purchase. Since you probably won't have enough money to purchase everything you want, we encourage you to collaborate with other players to purchase features that you can't afford.
 

Here are the details of the game.
 

Game: %partyname%

Date: %date%

Time: %time% %timezone%

Click on this link to play the game: %playlink%

You have been registered for this game with the following e-mail address: %email%. Please use this e-mail address when you join the game.

Sincerely,

%plannername%

 Words bracketed with % symbols are called tags. Tags are replaced by the system with information before the email is sent to your players.
 

Click here to read more.