Some of you, assuming you read the previous post, may be wondering why I rambled on for so long about the Model 2 paradigm - well it’s going to be the premise of how I design LiberalLab. The idea here is that I’m going to sketch out a basic idea of what the model, view and controller are going to be and then I’ll go about figuring out how I’m going to code each of these pieces up. Since we’ve already divided our application up into 3 major sections, it makes sense to do the same with our design, we’ll leave the parts that require integration for a bit later.
Social Network Model
The social network is probably our most primitive application in the system. It’s going to be a series of forms that user fills out after signing up that details some aspects about them, the remainder of the information will simply be generated automatically by the system.
What do we want to track? Well, we’re going to want to have the person’s name, professional title if relevant, a few pictures, a brief write up about them, top 5 most important political issues to that person (perhaps selected from a list?), policy discussions they are taking part in, policy discussions they’ve signed up for, a link to their blog karma score, other user comments.
Other features that we may want to include once we’ve got these basics are a latest posts and latest policy suggestions list. This would display all the posts you have permission to read that this other person wrote. A friend’s list ala MySpace would also prove well, but I think it would be wise to limit this to people who know each other outside LiberalLab, given that the audience for this is going to be pretty small sub 10,000 or so we don’t want everyone friending everyone else on the network.
We could also include an RSS dump of their blog, users could drop the RSS/Atom link for their blog and it could display their entries right there on the profile.
Badges
This is an idea that although hokey when explained is astoundingly effective when put into practice. The idea here is to create boyscout style merit badges for various accomplishments via LiberalLab. They can be anything from 100 forum posts badge, 200 karma on a single post badge, a badge for each policy discussion a user takes part in etc. It sounds juvenile and in many respects it is, but the numbers speak for themselves in various communities including open source projects - people will work for them. The idea is to use the badges as a prestige system in addition to the karma - the badges are accrued whereas karma is used like currency. The administration can encourage certain activities by creating badges as incentive - it sounds ridiculous but anyone who uses Xbox live knows the insane lengths people will go to to collect them.
I think people like the fact that they’re being acknowledged for their work on projects or forums or communities - it gives them a sense of accomplishment and the longer they’re there, the more karma/badges… people like to look important
This looks like a very interesting idea, are you still working out how to do it - or are you now in the process of putting the project together and make it?
Left by Claire on January 31st, 2007