A new prototype out of the Greenpeace Innovation Lab may be the key to unlocking the future of online activism. It’s a game that allows members of the public to track illegal deforestation in Argentina using real satellite images. Rather than clicking to sign an online petition, liking a post on Facebook or donating to an organization, this new game shifts the balance of power so that people can participate in a campaign on a deeper level.

Players earn scores and interact with a community of like-minded people, while bringing attention to a vital environmental issue.

“We want our supporters to be the hero of the story and enable them to campaign together with the community, together with us,” explains Ingo Boltz, manager of the Innovation Lab.

“We’re getting away from this elitist approach (that says) we know it all, we do the actions, you just donate money and we’ll take care of the rest. “So the question is, how do you actually do that?” The interactive game Greenpeace Guardianes — Spanish for “guardians” — launched as the kick-off to a Greenpeace campaign to stop illegal deforestation in the Salta province of northern Argentina in late January. The campaign targets the government of Salta for approving the recategorization of protected areas into unprotected ones, despite the Environmental Protection of Native Forests Act, a 2007 law that vows to protect endangered forest in the region.

Eyes on the Forest: Tracking Illegal Logging One Click at a Time

Organizers integrated Greenpeace Guardianes into the larger deforestation campaign, asking supporters to help co-create a complete map of Salta’s forestland and have fun in the process. To date, more than 23,500 registered players have collectively classified 530 km2 of forestland as illegally logged.

After an easy tutorial that explains to players what they must look for, they can view satellite images provided for free from NASA, comparing what a parcel of land looked like in 2008 to what it looks like today. If it appears companies are logging illegally, the player marks an alert on the plot in question. To avoid false positives, 30 other players must verify such an alert, and after that it passes for final confirmation to a group of Greenpeace campaigners or trained volunteers. Only then does the alert become “official,” enabling players to create a public denouncement — a form containing information about the specific plot of land that the player can use to write to the corresponding governor’s office, or publish a denouncement on Facebook or Twitter.

Verification by Greenpeace staff can become a bottleneck when thousands of people play the game. To remediate this, Innovation Lab is currently collecting data on the accuracy of player verifications. If the player crowd turns out to be sufficiently accurate, a semi-automatic verification system will be implemented that only flags “uncertain” alerts (on which the community opinion is divided) for Greenpeace authorization. Alerts with a high degree of consensus by players will be auto-approved.

Both reporting new plots with illegal deforestation and verifying the plots of others are ways for players to increase their score.