Provocative ideas

Provocative ideas

Hi everyone,

Read an article this morning about visualizing human capital that I thought people here would find interesting.

My takeaway: If we had ways to visualize the sum effect of the great work from the community, that would go a long way in influencing how people work together.

Put another way, being able to show certain things can have a powerful effect on how people behave. We spend a lot of time debating policy as a way to influence behavior, but perhaps our biggest tool for leverage is our ability to change the environment. How much healthier would the community be if we simply had more human messages? Pictures of people on profile pages, even avatars? Etc.

This group has already done a tremendous job of discussing many of these ideas. Keep it up. :-)

Eekim20:13, 18 December 2009

I think the closest thing that touches upon this is social features. I agree that we could get much more out of the community if we could coordinate people and keep them talking to one another. The biggest challenge there, though, is making sure they don't coordinate attacks on one another, and build up factions. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has already gone there. It's something we will have to work on as we get closer to the deadline.

Randomran18:05, 20 December 2009