BudgetWiser: Gamification Design Opportunities in the Government Budget Domain

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’15 , April 18–23, 2015, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Abstract In our research project, dubbed BudgetWiser, we focus on the government budget, one of the most important policy documents of a government. Our goal is to increase public interests in the budget and encourage public participation in the budgeting process by leveraging open government data. We envision interactive tools in which taxpayers’ budget navigation and sensemaking activities lead to meaningful resources for future taxpayers. A primary design goal is incentivizing taxpayers – often with low interests and awareness of the budget – to engage in such activities. We believe gamification can provide a viable solution to our challenge. We share some design lessons from our exploration in the budget domain with two prototype systems: Factful and BudgetMap. In the workshop, we hope to discuss various ways to incorporate gamification into our systems to encourage public participation.