Re: [Winona] Survey Report

[Steve Kranz]

An interesting variation on the "rating" idea is www.e-thepeople.org.  Randy and I met the creators of this website at a conference a few years ago.   The idea they have worked with is to have a civic discussion (like WOD), but it takes place on a website.  Each post is "rated" by including a question at the end of the post asking the reader to click a link that reads as follows:   Was this article informative? Was it stimulating? You decide if others should read it. [click here to "encourage"][click here to "discourage"]   The posts that have the most "encouragement" move to the top of the page and the ones with the least encouragement move to the bottom and eventually drop off the page.  The advantage of this system is that it allows thousands of people to participate, while keeping the volume of posts manageable by helping readers focus on the most constructive and interesting posts.   It does have some disadvantages in that it takes place on a website (rather than email).  This probably results in less consistent participation.  It also required a high degree of technical knowledge to design and implement (and can be confusing to users), but I think it is a pretty creative solution to taking a basic email list and scaling it up to a very large number of participants.   -Steve Kranz       ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Carlson To: Online Democracy Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 2:45 PM Subject: RE: [Winona] Survey Report Thanks, Kathy, for sharing the survey with us.  I think it reminds us of many things we probably already know: WOD is a useful tool, many people would like to do more with it, and uncivil comments are a hindrance.  I am reminded of another web-based experiment:   I just finished reading a very interesting book, "Emergence" by Steven Johnson, that analyzes among other things* how computer software can be made to "learn".  He mentions a web-site, slashdot.com, which is a bulletin board and chat group geared to computer techies.  Slashdot has thousands of members and thousands of posts.  The creators of slashdot set up a system whereby other subscribers would read all the posts in a given month and "rate" them for content, clarity, and overall quality.  This ad hoc committee of reviewers would be rotated, so no one had to do it full time, and so that many people got a chance to review the posts.  The reviewers' grades for various posts and the post-ers were compiled and noted on the web site.  This way people could get someone's opinion of which posts were worth looking at, and whose posts were usually worth the time of day.  Note that it was not the web-master grading or censoring the posts, but the actual members themselves.    This experiment is probably far more sophisticated than WOD aspires to be, but it begs a question for all of us - what would WOD look like, and what would our own posts look like, if the other members were looking at our posts, grading them, and posting the results anonymously on line?  What would each of us do to earn the respect of our fellow WOD members and thereby be assured that people would be urged to actually read our opinions, as opposed to being way down the list of worthwhile reading?   - Phil Carlson, Mpls   * P.S. Johnson's book also looks at ant colonies, slime mold, computer games like Sim City, patterns of urban growth, and the evolution of DNA and other aspects of our biology.  Fascinating reading!