I just applied to this cool conference in Victoria called Idea Wave. It’s on July 10-11, 2010. Here is my application to speak for 10 minutes about the QuestionCollector. By the way, I’ve been trying to think of a better name for the product. Maybe PeaceQuest? (the domain is for sale, but I can’t afford it yet.) Would love to hear your ideas for a name.
Title:
A value centered social game for questioning everything.
Talk Abstract:
A text-based social game for online debate. We want your questions, the ones that burn
in your identity. The ones that move you to action. The ones that make you burst into
laughter. We want you to gather with people and organizations of similar values and form
questioning communities. We want to serve your debates, and opinions in a fun and
neutral sandbox where you control your identity. Most of all, we want you to feel
empowered to share your vision.
My vision is peace. There is a great deal of fighting in the world today. Our
democracies suffer under partisanship and apathy; our nations send young people to die
for an idea; and our cultures wrestle with how to live together in harmony. I’ve been
playing games all my life. I think life is a game, and I think we need a new game board,
so we can figure out what we really want, as a whole. Once we have a base of
understanding I think it will become clear that peace is one thing we all want and then
maybe we’ll be able to convince our leaders to stop fighting so much.
What is your vision?
My Bio:
I am. A crazy man. An ex jazz musician, a micro poet, a dancer, a visionary nobody with
some technical skills. I have a degree in Computer Science (UVic 2005) I have worked in
the IT consulting industry for 5 years on a variety of projects in mentoring, forestry,
and healthcare. I like philosophy, walking, talking to birds, yoga, politics, astrology,
freedom, and music.
I am a big picture guy. I don’t see problems, so much as an absence of meaningful
action. I want to empower people to know themselves and their neighbors, so they can
share their response to the big questions of our shared world. I want peace.
http://g-a-i-a.org/bio
http://youtube.com/jazzmann71
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
Scott Lewis
@wizard_71
Tags: conference, peace, pitch, questions
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Hi Scott,
Thanks for your submission! Can you provide the board of advisors a
little more clarity on this social game you’re proposing? How is it
played? What does it resolve that doesn’t exist today?
Thanks in advance!
How it is played depends on the player. Recent developments have helped me see that it
is less of a “game” (which many associate with some form of winning condition or
graphical thing) and more of a debate network with meta-game mechanics to drive content
creation, filtering, and ranking. The player will participate in the way they choose and
then will fill a role in the debating culture. Some examples:
1) Witness: A witness reads lots of stuff and follows data without interacting that much.
2) Questioner: They ask lots of questions and help others formulate their question to
make them clear.
3) Tagger: Someone who labels stuff or verifies the labels that have been applied.
4-10) other roles with their associated actions.
Your actions won’t be limited to your role, but your role will be determined by which
actions you most enjoy participating in. Then you will have an opportunity to advance in
that role and gain greater responsibility and powers within the community.
The other part of the “game” will be an election system. Periodic elections to vote for
who you want to be working content at higher levels. The higher the level the more time
you spend helping others develop their roles and assuring the quality of the content at
the level over which you reside.
Combined with this I have ideas for a new ranking and privacy system that will truly give
people the freedom they are looking for when participating in online communities.
I just got into this beta and I’m excited to see that they are doing something so similar
to what I envision: http://quora.com is an example of the basic question engine that
would drive things. The bits they are lacking is how to create the culture required to
actually achieve their goal of a “continuously improving collection of questions and
answers”. They are also missing a business model, which I am also working on. They are
months ahead of me with their prototype and first round of financing, but I’m just using
this as fuel for my passion to make something really cool and useful to people. Who knows
maybe they’ll hire me to help them pivot away from becoming another Yahoo!Answers. We
shall see.
What does it resolve that doesn’t exist today? The pain I see is a big one and this pdf
from the WEC is some good info about the gap that exists between our institutions and our
values: http://www.weforum.org/pdf/grs2010/report/1-Values-Framework.pdf I want to build
the framework that lets us debate about how to close the gap. My personal thing is peace
and I think talking and questions are the key to achieving more of it. This will be the
value that I bring to my participation on the site, once it is ready. Other people will
hold to other values and express around those. This is happening all over the internet,
but it is a spew of information and misinformation and the current social networks have
created user centered places without providing high quality frameworks for organizing the
data that users are sharing. This article about how culture is what is needed to build
the filter for the internet is very telling.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html
Thus I aim to bring a rewarding, cultural experience where people collaborate to
understand what we really value. Then perhaps it will become an institution which can
provide the example for other institutions to better align with our values, thus closing
the gap.
Thanks for your questions! I hope I’ve revealed what you need to know and I welcome more
questions.
Got a request for a live meeting to handle more questions. I have withdrawn my submission. I could not afford to make the trip from Nanaimo and have not worked on the presentation, because they took too long to confirm me and have been working on other priorities.