Sustainability Badges for Foursquare

I, Merissa Mueller, am the conqueror of cartography, maker of maps, artist of the atlas, and most recently the foursquare flunky.

See, I’m new to foursquare. I have heard of it, mostly because sometimes on Facebook my homepage decides to tell me the locations of my drunken friends. Other than that, the concept is quite familiar because of my work with mapping but I had no experience with it until recently.

I had created a foursquare account quite a while back for the office to which I added “lists” entailing where on and off campus you should visit along with a short “tip” about the building/location. Since I have no access to a smart phone (hell, I don’t even have a real calling plan on my crappy phone, just texting) I couldn’t go much further with our profile than that. I could not “check in” to places, upload photos to my profile, become the “mayor” of a spot and most unfortunately, I could not earn a single badge which made me feel horrible. I mean, even if you’re crappy at tying knots in girl scouts, I think they’d give you a badge for just showing up.

The solution to this problem was Jon, as usual, and his ipod thang that has built-in GPS and wifi capabilities. He started checking in places and making the office’s presence known around campus. Social media is strange to me in the sense that we seem to do a lot of making ourselves known and available to the campus community. Whether this involves adding uOttawa students, plastering buildings with “tips” about the awesome sustainability features, or just becoming the mayor of buildings so our presence is known when someone checks in (and subsequently becoming interested in us) is in some way what branding is all about about.

Where does the conqueror of cartography, maker of maps, and artist of the atlas come in? Well, it seemed natural to assign such Geo-positional type social media to me which means I am revamping our foursquare account, “tips”, “lists”, etc. I have looked into getting badges created for the office which means you could grab up a badge for completing a green tour of campus or a thrifty tour of Ottawa’s second-hand stores! I would rather have those badges than one for tying knots or learning to start fires any day.

If there are any cool sustainability badges that you really want to see on campus, I am harvesting requests as we speak.

~ meriss - campus sustainability coordinator

photo credit - jonathan rausseo