idea: suggestion box

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at tummy.com> wrote:
> I don't know that voting and having a full blown ideastorm like site is
> that great. I think it lends into having a lot of people expect that
> ideas that are "voted" the highest will automagically be worked on,
> when it's not really the case.


Only if you expose the vote totals for viewing directly.

You can use idea voting in another way...you can encourage people to
vote on ideas and then systematically sort the collection of ideas and
voting records to come up with clumps of ideas and corresponding
clumps of people who support a common theme and encourage them to work
together towards their common aims. Instead of simply voting and
expecting others to work on it the idea voting process becomes a way
to map out groups of people who can work together towards a shared
interest.  The board can look over the identified clumps, identity the
ones that are generally inline with overall project goals and work to
get the clumps of people working together as a self-supporting group.

Its like how online dating sites work. Answer questions (creating a
voting record) and use that to find a similarity metric. Except we can
do it to find proto-working groups in a way that hopefully
self-selects against poisonous personalities.


In this sort of scheme, general popularity of a single idea isn't the
metric. Its the similarity of multiple ideas and how people prioritize
ideas.

We could go further along the onling dating system analogy and if we
could collect skills information we could even try to figure out which
proto-team not only has critical mass of interested participants but
also skillset coverage.

-jef