How Ideologi Works

Ideologi uses a novel method called iterative sampling to divine the wisdom of any crowd...

 

 

Users of Ideologi participate in user-generated group brainstorming sessions called dialogues. Any user can start a dialogue with Ideologi by posting an invitation for one. There's no limit to the number of users who can participate in a dialogue. However, the initiator of a dialogue can also set limitations as to who can join and how many.  Users become participants of a dialogue by accepting the rules of participation as set by the initiator (the user who initiated the dialogue) and then submitting an insight that best answers the subject of the dialogue.  The goal of each dialogue is to use the exchange of insights among participants to produce a revelation, which is deemed the most valuable insight of the dialogue, as determined by its participants.

 

You might say to yourself, "this concept isn't new--even standard blogging platforms can help facilitate something like this, more or less."  But here's how Ideologi takes things to the next level...

  

When a dialogue begins, Ideologi initiates simultaneous conversations (called exchanges) between all of the participants by transmitting unique samples of submitted insights to each participant for feedback. During each of these exchanges, participants are given 100 credits (called Ions) to distribute among the sample of insights sent to them, according to how they personally think these insights rank against each other. For example, when a participant is evaluating three insights in an exchange, they can choose to give 50 Ions to the insight they favor the most, 30 Ions to their second most favorite insight and 20 Ions to the one that they like the least.  Or, they could give all 100 Ions to one proposal and zero Ions to the remaining two.

 

So, grading content is by no means new, but the automated parsing out of every submission for comparative sampling by the participants is entirely unique.

 

In addition to distributing Ions, participants are also instructed to submit feedback to each of the insights presented to them.  The functionality provided to participants for feedback in a dialogue includes rich text formatting, hyperlinks, file uploading and Wiki-style edits of the insights themselves.  Participants can use feedback to update their own insights, remix and/or duplicate content from insights evaluated in their previous exchanges, or to delete their original insight altogether and start from scratch.  This ensures that ideas, concepts, memes, etc. within each dialogue will continue to survive, evolve, mate, or perish with each new exchange, in a similar fashion to natural selection.

 

Here's another potential first:  Imbedding wiki-style editing into the feedback process.  Instead of requiring the creator of the idea to review the comments and figure out how to include them, the commenter now can simply edit the proposals to show exactly how to edit it.  The creator gets revision control, so they can take it or leave, but at least both parties have a much clearer understanding of what they meant...

 

In order to reduce social bias based on participants knowing the identity, social status, or relationships of other participants, all communication within a dialogue is transmitted anonymously.  Doing so neutralizes the normal interference of social bias that is so common with group consensus generation, freeing its users to maximize both their personal creativity and private judgment.  The identities of participants are anonymous during a dialogue, even to the initiator of the dialogue itself.  Until the dialogue has ended, no one knows the relationships between participants and their contributed content.  During the entire length of the dialogue, participants can only view insights (and their associated scores and feedback) from exchanges that were sent to them by Ideologi, as well as feedback given to their own proposals from other participants.

 

Anonymity on the internet may be a contentious concept, but there are certain online places that will benefit from it's continued existence.  Ideologi is one of them.

 

Ideologi repeats this process of exchanging insights as many times as was requested by the initiator when the dialogue was originally posted.  The insight that accumulates the highest number of ions is accepted as the epiphany of the dialogue.

 

Think about it:  the worst characteristic of classic brainstorming is the lack a definitive agreement at the end of the process.  Spawning ideas is exhilirating (at least for those yearning for creative expression). But the deliberation period that typically follows afterwards are dreadful.  Fresh and promising ideas are compromised, executed, or simply abandoned, making the entire exercise a complete farce.  Is it is any wonder why classic brainstorming has such a negative connotation among so many people, regrdless of their level of participation?

 

By using comparative sampling, Ideologi builds a matrix of statistical inferences as to which insight is more or less valuable to another insight as collectively perceived by that population of participants.  Ideologi can determine (within a range of statistical probability) where each insight ranks within the collective population of participants, even if each participant completes only a handful of exchanges and even if there are millions of insights circulating within a dialogue.  With each new set of responses from each exchange, Ideologi fills up the missing gaps across a comparative landscape of insights and their associated responses in the dialogue.  Even though a tiny fraction of participants are given the opportunity to respond to the insight that is declared the wisdom of the dialogue, it’s still a certainty that it would have garnered the highest score.  This is true even if time permitted everyone the ability to compare it against every other insight in the dialogue.  And that's because the sampling methodology is grounded in the same mathematics used to predict election outcomes, separate spam from friendly e-mail, or to give useful product recommendations to return customers on an e-commerce web site.

 

At this moment, explicit comparative sampling is being used in a mode made famous by the web site "Hot or Not":  Users are presented with two pieces of content (ususally a line of text or a picture) and are asked to decide which one they like the best.  No commentary can be submitted with your answer, so the reason why you made your choice never makes it into an incredibly narrow feedback loop...

 

With Ideologi, large-scale organizations will be able to engage with their constituencies in ways that would be considered science fiction.  Ad hoc communities that lack organizational structure will be able to operate as coherently as those with permanent hierarchies.  Legions of lone entrepreneurs would be able to work together to produce an endless array of intellectual property (patents, copy-written material, artwork, etc.).  And a multitude of online users could use it to discover exciting new possibilities for personal expression and social interaction.

 

Here's what makes Ideologi unique from other services and methodologies being used on the Internet today...