I am part of a technological consulting project for my sorority's international office. Representatives (comprised mostly of alumnae plus two collegians including myself) are spread throughout the country, so meetings primarily take place through Skype. Trust matters in this community because each member has to satisfactorily fulfill her role in order for us to make any progress on our undertakings- if one of my colleagues says that she will e-mail me information by a certain time, I need to be able to make solid plans assuming that she will keep her promise. For example, we are currently working on a system that would give chapters a more user-friendly digital master calendar. However, we have to make sure that everyone submits their input before moving forward. If we have to keep waiting for one member to comment, we will never complete the task.
Desirable behaviors include active participation in synchronous meetings as well as online threads. We want each member to apply her knowledge of web-based interfaces in a way that would make Delta Gamma's online efforts as easy and proficient as possible to the greatest number of users. My reputation system would reward active participation with anchor-shaped icons (since an anchor is my sorority's symbol) next to the users' Skype names and e-mail addresses when they are communicating with other group members. Skype would monitor the user's voice during conference calls, and e-mail would keep track of the user reading the thread and the number of responses sent. The respective clients would tally up the number of utterances or responses compared to the total amount of communication among the group. There would be four levels of participation- white, bronze, blue, and pink. The least amount of participation (zero) would be represented by white, whereas the highest would be represented by pink.
This scheme could be easily manipulated- users could make nonsense utterances during Skype meetings or send one-word responses over e-mail. They could also refuse to take part in the system all together so that they can participate as much or as little as they would like. However, these manipulations would be clear to the group and would encourage the group to keep their own notes about participation in addition to the automated counts.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
You make a good point about manipulation of the system. When I was designing the reputation system in my post, I built it up in my mind as being so great...but then when I got to the part about potential abuse of the system, I realized how easy it might be to take advantage of it.
ReplyDeleteI ended up choosing to have human moderation of system through evaluations of reports. I would have preferred to have some sort of system that resists manipulation, but in some cases, if you want the best functionality, you need to just go with the assumption that your users will play by the rules.
Hey...in an ideal world, reputation systems used by honest people would be EASY to design, right? But there's always someone who wants to beat the system.
I like that your reputation system incorporates participation in multiple media - Skype calls and email. The colors are nice for denoting various reputation levels because new members don't have to see a zero or an arbitrary low number next to their names (that can be discouraging). I think colors make the system less competitive, while still providing useful information about members' participation.
ReplyDeleteAs Eric noted above, it might be good to have some human input to the system. If fellow members evaluated your contributions, you could not boost your reputation by sending one word emails, for example.