During a “KM Conversation” with knowledge management evangelist and expert Stan Garfield, he focused on using gamification techniques—including awarding points and point scoring—to help build user engagement and ensure your KM platform is vibrant and widely leveraged within your organization.

Gamification techniques can be very useful to knowledge managers as part of a strategy to encourage participation in knowledge initiatives. In Stan Garfield’s experience, typical game-playing elements such as point scoring are successful in building activity on a KM platform.

Mr. Garfield explained his SAFARIS Star framework. This is a great illustration of how you can give points out and can weight them to encourage users to do the things you believe are more important. As you see in the image below, in his SAFARIS model, answering a question is the most heavily valued participatory element.

You can develop a similar framework. The important thing is that you define the things you want done, assign a point value to them, and automate the awarding, so that when people do those things, the points are automatically tallied and displayed…underpinning the all-important public recognition that is an important part of motiving people to participate in knowledge exchange.

You can hear more from Stan Garfield on this and related issues when you link to “Gamification Accelerates KM Adoption.”