What is ideologi?

 

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

Linus Pauling

 

________ 

 

 

► ideologi (pronounced "ideology") is an evolutionary collaboration methodology that facilitates the rational production of ideas by employing time-based, mass-participation brainstorming contests (called exchanges) for any subject matter (commerce, politics, arts, philosophy, etc.) using any type of electronic content (text, images, spreadsheets, etc.) with any population of online users (intranet, extranet or public Internet).  Users (called participants) can either submit answers (called directives) to an exchange or develop their own questions (called objectives) to initiate their own exchange for others to join.

In terms of the tangible forms in which it could be manifested, the possibilities are endless:  a web portal application, a web service offering for webmasters and their users, a network of peer-to-peer (P2P) clients, or even the subroutine for a neural network of cybernetic entities.  That choice is up to the ingenuity of those who wish to bring ideologi to life.

 

► If a participant is interested in creating an exchange with other participants of ideologi, then all they need to do is establish its objective and then publish it.  This makes them the initiator of that exchange.  It is up to them to determine whether their exchange will be open to all of ideologi's worldwide community or closed to an exclusive group of participants.

 

► The primary process by which ideologi operates is comparative evaluation.  Within each exchange, participants evaluate and score a sampling of anonymized directives submitted by fellow participants through a series of rounds called evaluation phases.  It is important to note that the initiator of an exchange does not determine the winner(s) of their exchange.  It's a "subjectively objective" battle of concepts set on an objective-driven terrain whose success depends on the judgment of an algorithmically-assigned jury of peers.

 

► The units used for scoring directives in each exchange are called ions.

 

► The directive that accumulates the highest score within an exchange is called the Prime Directive. Each participant receives their score in Ions, which also determines the allotment of any financial payout (called commission) established by the initiator of the exchange.  The portions of the commission given to each user is based on the number of ions they accumulate in an Exchange relative to the total number of Ions accumulated by all of the other participants.  Therefore, there’s never a "single winner" in terms of accumulating ions or receiving commissions.

 

► Participants may join or create as many exchanges as they want as often as they wish based on the availability of open exchanges or interest levels of other participants.

 

Comments

[Kyle Redington]

If this is a "conceptual snapshot" a universal exchange of ideas, it would be in your best interest to also define the people within this system, as people in this system would have different values than of someone living today.

This idea of "scoring" confuses me. You speak of the judgement we pass onto these objects of thoughts in the form of a grade or score, but I am not even sure of what your definition of judgement is.

By what criteria do these people judge, what do they draw upon to make their conclusions about the ideas?
Are all people capable of judging these ideas or only experts within that field?
How can one know that what the collective judgement states as being the best is actually the best?

I also wanted to make it clear that I am not attacking you or your idea in any way, I am just bringing these things to your awareness, and you have the choice to acknowledge their importance or cast them off into the infinite abyss.

________

Kyle,

You’ve asked some very important questions in your post and I thank you for it! It actually took me a while to realize it. I first thought that you misconstrued some of the logic behind the idea, but then I realized that I made an unfair assumption of what you were supposed to “get” on your own. Sometimes, authors forget that what’s there on the page for the reader to see is not the same as what’s in their head. So here goes…

The creation of ideologi is not intended for members of some culturally-advanced civilization in some post-contemporary world. The intended users are you and I and the millions of intellectually engaged users of the Internet. Now, you may think that I must be living in a dream-world when it comes to a real understanding of cultural and psychological frailties of human nature. Let me assure that this is absolutely not the case. So much so that I diverted my efforts away from the path one would expect from a typical “techno-utopian” – delving into technical matters -- and forced myself to research the social theories that would support or deny the usability of such a system. At first, I was rather doubtful myself as to whether ideologi could be anything more than a way for larger corporations to “polish-up” product ideas before producing them for the marketplace. Six months prior to the publication of this open blog, I started working on a business plan to present to angel investors and venture capitalists. However, the further I went down the rabbit hole, I realized that I had stumbled onto something a little bit bigger than I had previously imagined.

Take a moment to review the books listed on the right side of this page. Most of what you see is not directly related to technology. They all deal with varying aspects of social theory. It took quite some time to get through them all, but it was well worth it. You see, I wasn’t confident enough to argue the merits of ideologi based on my own personal experiences of human nature. At the time of this writing, I am 37 years old and live in New York City. Ironically, it seems that the greatest failings we have as a species capable of producing cultural artifacts is in our misunderstanding of what we are truly capable of in terms of modifying the culture itself. For example, here’s a social theory that, one way or another, is substantiated by every single one of those books:

With the right social setting under controlled conditions, nearly all of the structural elements of understanding, including what one would recognize as “common sense,” follow the same functional pattern of biological evolution.

[IMPORTANT: I would ask everyone who reads this post to do one thing before leaving the site. Click on each of the books on the right to read the summary provided by Amazon.com. One should be able to glean my underlying objective by doing so…]

Have you heard of the term captology? It was coined at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. Here’s their definition: “The study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people's attitudes or behaviors.” The head of the lab, BJ Fogg, wrote an interesting (yet basic) book entitled Persuasive Technology (see right).

So, is ideologi a gaming environment for creatives, a marketplace of intellectual property for industry, or some sort of hyper-dialogue for the digerati? Or is it something much more basic, like an intellectual honey pot? That's for the participants to decide. Take a look at the modifiable parameters listed on the post entitled “Initiating an Exchange (of Ideas) with ideologi.” How does each of them change the nature of the interactions amongst participants? How would a group of strangers define the parameters in a contest to create an ideal professional sports team? How would it be customized for a strategic planning session for a business consortium?

Now, here's an answer to your questions regarding scoring, judgment and the concept of determining the best directive for accomplishing an objective: There is no universal definition for converting a judgement into a particular score in ideologi. Instead, each initiator needs to create a definition for participants to review and follow during the course of their exchange. The success or failure of each exchange will depend on it. Regardless, the concept of judgement itself is mired in subjectivity. So be it. But the same thing could be said for the price of a commodity in a marketplace. What I mean is that just because a number of unrelated buyers determine the same price of an item doesn’t mean that they used the same value metric in doing so. However, that is the brilliance of the marketplace. It is also its ignorance. As you have suspected, the most popular answer (known in ideologi nomenclature as the prime directive) is not necessarily the best. But that brings up another question. How does one determine the best answer in Aany scenario? Who determines that criterion to be the best? And who determines the qualification for deciding who gets to decide? The answers to all of these questions are based on the subjectivity of evaluation, whether it’s from an individual or from a population. At the end of the day, even our most logically-structured concepts are rife with ideological artifacts. Please do not confuse this for some kind of sophistry; that which we call "culture," "market," "corporation," "nation" or worldview are nothing more than colossal castles built in a conceptual ether called ideology. Thus the name.

One of the parameters available to an initiator of an exchange is whether or not participation is “open” to anyone interested or “closed” to those occupying a fixed list of participants maintained by the initiator. So, the initiator of each exchange determines whether or not they want to have “experts-only.”

-mykljonzun