Idea Evaluation Form

Choose criteria with which you would like to evaluate an idea:

Fill out the information for this form as best as you can. Until I get it automated, you can submit your idea to me with One the one hand and disagree to my e-mail address at

Rating Ideas

I think you would start buy rating post, instead of rating people, even though I brought up the idea of rating people. I think you would get more bang for the buck rating ideas, and so I would start with that, and then move onto rating people.

This would work by simply letting users pick from hundred of possible questions on which they could rate the idea on a scale from 1 to 10. For instance you could rate an idea on the basis of:

Writing skills/Effort

How Concisely Written it was

Grammar

Spelling

If idea is cost effective or efficient

If the idea was logical

The kindness shown in the idea

Fairness

If the idea showed an understanding of history

If the idea showed an understanding of possible consequences

If the idea showed an understanding of current events

If the author was completely truthful and honest in the way that he/she presented facts, information and statistics.

If the author over used exaggeration.

If the solution was practical.

The user wouldn't have to rate an idea on each criteria. However statistics would be maintained on each user. One statistic could be the distance between the score the user assigned, and the average score. For instance lets say that user number A3i@4 rated the honesty of a post, as a 6, but the average person rated the honesty as a 9. The deviation would, of course, be 3. But the standard deviation and the confidence interval (that our user was different from average) would be dependent on the number of posts. We would have to hire a couple of pretty good statisticians.

Other statistics that could be kept on users:

Average # of criteria that the user evaluates. Perhaps their would be rewards for users that typically are very thorough in their evaluations.

Perhaps each action could be evaluated by others. For instance lets say someone gives an idea's honesty a rating of 3. Other people could come in and post a reason to disagree with that rating, such as: "Their is no reason to give the person a 3 on honesty! She didn't even say anything that could be construed as a lie! You shouldn't evaluate the honesty of a post unless the person asserts some sort of statistic." Then people could agree or disagree with that statement on a scale from 1 to 10, affecting the overall score of the original user, depending on weather or not people approved of his action. If then people could turn around and evaluate their actions, then the system would police itself.

This would be like the real world. You can not take actions, in the real world, without having to worry about their consequences.

You could come up with all sorts of ways of rewarding "good" behavior and "punishing" bad behavior. We should look to experts in conflict resolution to determine what good discussion (board) behavior would be and what bad discussion behavior is. I've taken one of these classes and I think about it all the time. I think the best way of implementing good conflict resolution is online.

From what I have posted so far, my idea might seem to reward "group think" or people who conform. There are some reasons to think this is good. For instance isn't that how the Google algorithm works now? Yes. It takes a continuous poll to see which web pages are the best. It conducts this poll by evaluating a webpage by how many links their are to it from other polls. So to assume this will work you have to have some sort of faith in people. You have to assume that they will tend to link to better pages that poor ones.

In the same way, democracies rely on the hypothesis that the majority of people will choose good actions for their government to take, or a republic assumes that the people will choose good representatives.

But I think it would be easy to reward people who are willing to think differently, but in the end they are proven right. One way to do this is to reward people who buy low and sell high, or buy into an idea when it is not popular, but stay around until it finally becomes popular.

In this way, it could become a game, where undervalued ideas are snatched up, much like undervalued companies are snatched up in the stock market.

But I diverge.