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Team Awesome will be a web-based community based off of user generated content relating to environmental and energy conservation.  Postings will be rated by users to  award Awesome Points to the content posters.  This will allow Team Awesome to identify users to have created valuable content and generate movements and communities around them, identifying them as 'The Most Awesome.'  To our knowledge there is no site currently that places value in user generated content to promote awareness of these movements and with which standard social networking game techniques are used to create communities and incentives to continue posting more content.

The aim of Team Awesome is to make environmental and energy conservation approachable to everyone.  The site will encourage users to post content that they identify with, and will reward ingenuity, humor, as well as impact.   Having a diverse user base will allow Team Awesome to lower the barrier of entry into awareness for first-timers and create new affinity groups for dedicated activists in a thought-provoking and engaging way.  We hope the site generates novel approaches and perspectives on how environmental and energy conservation can relate and be incorporated in a diverse population.  This will be measured through the number of registered users who post content, and the number of visitors who rate site content.  

Restructuring the perception of how environmental and energy issues can be integrated to the younger generation will be essential in increasing the penetration of behavior change efforts into these market segments. The most powerful movements are realized through intrinsic motivations, which are often best developed through autonomy of the end user. Instead of the traditional top? down, controlled environmental and energy movement, we envision a forum that reward creativity, ingenuity, and humor to develop a community that celebrates the diversity of ways environmental sustainability can be integrated into our daily lives.

Initially, this ability of enacting behavioral change through game incentives was inspired by the gaming concept of Byron Reeves of the H*STAR group at Stanford (concept can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDR0?QgqiEk ) The potential of this concept was extended by the myriad of news aggregators, social networking and blog sites that address social needs via humor, low barrier of entry, and differentiation. Furthermore, we suggest that such sites are popular in part do to underlying social commentary in their content. First, sites such as stackoverflow.com/ demonstrate that niche community’s can be fostered (in this case developer questions and answers) through user?generated content. The popularity of the site is due to allowing users to direct content to best meet their needs and interest while marketing to the developer community to attract early?adopters and new users. Similarly, the widespread success of wikis such as wikipedia illustrate the same business plan.

Secondly, sites such as thisiswhyyourefat.com use humor to create social commentary based off of user generated content. Whether that was a goal of the site or not, the potential of such an approach to raise an awareness about the issues of diet in the US is clearly applicable.

Team Awesome is a departure from traditional environmental sustainability movements. One must forget the assumptions implicit in the traditional structure of such movements. Team Awesome will value both trivial and fundamental efforts to integrate environmental sustainability through user ratings and correlating issuing of Awesome Points for a particular user’s rating. For example, a user may justify their being green by packing many people into a Zipcar late at night to go to a diner or creating an indoor vegetable garden in their apartment. Based on user’s rating of these posts, users will be rewarded with Awesome Points. This platform will use humor and viewer loyalty to help meet its goals.