Jivespace: Message List - Do reputation points help or hurt?

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:11:15 GMT

yep

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:16:50 GMT

Has anyone "reset" the points after a period of time or at the start of the year.

In a long-standing instance, the points may indicate how long you've been in the communiy rather than "current active involvement"

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:40:08 GMT

Reputation points do not hurt in my opinion.. They give members of your community a feeling of involvment and a bit of a competitive spirit, because people are competitive "animals" by default

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

rick@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:58:39 GMT

What about sites where members are paying for access? Any examples of that, and how did/does/should that change your decision about whether or not to use reputation points?

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:18:25 GMT

This is an interesting question. I've sort of commented on this topic as it pertains to adoption of social networking sites. (Blog here: http://mattmaccaux.blogspot.com/2009/05/social-networking-for-masses.html)

I think that recognition points, rankings, badges, etc should only be used to rank content, not people. The reason for this (in my opinion) is that by explicitly ranking people, you end up excluding (by discouraging) those who don't have high ranks (or post counts, or rep points, or whatever.) The idea is to encourage people to add value to the process through adding content, opinions, etc and anything you might do to discourage this (either directly or indirectly) should be avoided.

Ranking the content, however is a good idea. I mean, isn't the idea of enabling the knowledge worker to find relevant content quickly the whole point of social tools for the enterprise? Ranking the people is only relevant to the point that their rank impacts the rank of the content being posted or commented on. However, the person's rank should be an implicit attribute rather than an explicit one so that people can not be ranked (explicitly) by their peers.

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

ted.hopton@ubm.com — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:05:25 GMT

I started reading this thread and only slowly realized how very long and winding a road it would turn out to be. I have two separate contributions to make.

First, we use the status points in Clearspace with our internal installation. We're about 5 months into our implementation. At first I used to barely mention the points when I did initial overview demos and training, but I quickly learned that the points really got people's attention. We seem to have many competitive people in our company! They enjoy the points, take them as nothing more than fun, and love to rib their colleagues about who has more medals or a more prestigious title.

While I worried about people gaming the system, it does not seem to have become an issue for us. I've published our levels and what it takes to achieve them, and that's become a popular page.

My second comment is on the term "reputation points." Since status level points are awarded in Clearspace primarily for creating content, I don't consider them measures of reputation. They are measures of activity, showing at a glance who has contributed the most in terms of content to the community. They are brownie points, gold stars, "attaboys," or whatever you want to call them, but they do not in any way truly measure one's reputation.

The only exception is that some points are awarded for correctly or helpfully answering questions. But I have no way to know when I see someone with 1000 points whether they got those points answering questions or dutifully posting a daily status report.

We would like to have a reputation measurement system. This thread has made clear that doing something like that well is no easy task, and perhaps is not even possible, yet. I really like the idea suggested above by Mark Masterson about using tags -- I think it has great potential to be both automated and useful:

Which brings me to my last point: there are better ways of achieving the nominal goal (identify the right people). For example, in a system where tagging is widespread, and where the tags are correlated to the users, there's an easy (and emergent) alternative: design the system so that "experts" are the people most strongly correlated to a given tag. In such a situation, the correlation between the tag and the user means something like "this is a person who writes a lot about this, who answers lots of questions about this, who asks lots of questions about this (and therefore has experience with it), or any combination of same". I would argue that this is at least as useful as the assumed value of a reputation point system, and has the advantage that it's much harder to game (not impossible, but hard enough that diminishing returns make it unlikely).

I'd love to see Jive work on that, and if they need any customer input or a working committee, I'd be happy to help.

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:39:31 GMT

Interesting, I thought the medal meant you were a high level contributor or was related to the ratings of your contributions... i've only been playing on the site for a hour though... but just my first impression.

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:31:15 GMT

I'd rather see a system that just establishes awards or statuses for accomplishing certain things. These might work like ribbons in the military or merit badges in the boy scouts.

The idea of awards/statuses mimics nicely what we see in the physical world. I can reward someone with more than just a thank you when they provide helpful information or resources. I've worked in places where people would give each other "$10,000 Bucks" or "$100,000 Bucks" bills to thank someone. Or, of course, you could really score by getting a corporate-branded paper weight -- we all need a desktop full of these.

I'd rather look at someone's profile and hover my mouse over their merit badge icons to learn about the specific ways in which they contributed to the community. Plus, I'd probably work at earning some myself! It would be a much more meaningful "award" system than just points.

Just as we provide emoticons to visualize our emotions in an email, let's provide a selection of awardicons or meriticons that I can provide a definition for and present to a deserving colleague.

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

reed.smidebush@vnsny.org — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:19:27 GMT

Wow, lots of responses on this!

I don't think that reputation systems always work well in external communities; it really depends on the theme/subject of the community itself. On top of that, there are two different types: point systems with accompanying status level (such as Beginner, Expert, etc.), and those that specify a status level based on a specific characteristic (such as identifying Jive employees here with a medal, regardless of points).

I think that point systems make sense for communities where the value of a member's contribution directly correlates to their experience and credibility within the community, such as most tech-based communities....I'd be more likely to take advice from an "Expert" with 1,000 points than a "Beginner" with 2 posts.

A point-based reputation system wouldn't make as much sense in a community where you want everyone to feel welcome and equal, such as a community for cancer patients and survivors, which was the first type of community that I helped to plan and develop (Barry gave us great advice on this). In that type of situation, you wouldn't want to disengage new or potential members by implementing a reputation system based on points. Everyone is either looking to give or get support, and the value that someone has to contribute in that area is not relevant to their point level. This is a case where a reputation system with an accompanying icon/title based on a characteristic such as "Just Diagnosed", "Survivor", "Caregiver", or a type of cancer, would be more relevant and valuable, and members would be able to more instantly recognize and connect with new and existing members.

That reminds me, is there any plan to include text beneath status icons in Clearspace? It would be much easier for new members here (and in other Jive communities) to identify Jive employees. As an alternative, an image with text included could be used, but a text display would be more ideal.

Re: Do reputation points help or hurt?

michaeljpastor@yahoo.com — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:30:02 GMT

My first attempt at a reply was lost to the ether, but I think my "keep me logged in" check box should stick this time.

Your kudos and concerns about recommendations are both spot-on. For example, I've been stuck at 90% on my LinkedIn profile because I lack two more recommendations. Now I actually have an issue with that, because it's not my fault - it isn't my responsibility to have a recommendation; the onus is on others to recommend me, not for me to solicit recommendations. I hate grovelling, brown-nosing and otherwise acting as a salesman. For me, the incentive (for the goal of 100%) should be the other way around - recommend 3 others.

It may seem silly to use a Likert scale numeric metric for a recommendation, but it does have some value. If it's one of a few (or several) metrics used in the final rep algorithm, you'll be able to tweak its influence in the final "score" (presuming you have a way to view the 'rithm transparently and can change it). How you tweak that Likert score can be influenced by the commentary that accompanies it.

It's pretty easy to give someone a "high five" when you're enthusiatically entranced by them, but if you're being overly gushy in your commentary (in someone else's opinion), that enthusiasm can be tempered by one's opinion of their opinion.

Let's presume it's a +10/-10 scale with commentary (I prefer 10 point scales over 5, because it allows for more nuance). The final outcome of the score would be affected by

1) my (subjective) relationship "score" (if any) with the recommender.

2) my (subjective) relationship "score" (if any) with the recommendee

3) my (subjective) opinion of the recommendation based on the commentary

4) the (objectively) collected (subjective) opinions of the recommendation

5) pick a metric, any metric.

6) and for their final rep score, how much recommendations factor into the final number

and of course we could go on ad infinitum with other factors, and none are really necessary. Having both a number and commentary provides for both subjective (free-form space to gush) and objective (a shared standard of measurement) factors.

Privacy about recommendations is important as well. There's not much incentive for me to give a negative recommendation if my name is attached - I don't necessarily think I need to own up to my comments, if my aims are altruistic and I'm trying to give constructive criticism. But privacy also allows for libelous commentary. Private recommendations could be allowed with a moderator/broker approval, if keeping things civil is an important aim, and you can even allow for hand-picked brokers/moderators. You could always subjectively "turn off" anonymous commentary but still allow for it.

Again, this is getting exponentially complicated, because it is. Ultimately a remote web-hosted SAAS platform (an objective/shared space) can't handle it, because it's infinitely subjective and requires (IMHO) a directly accessable desktop application. A peer-to-peer (or persona-to-persona) system is ultimately the only way to handle it. That's not a reason for SAAS companies to become despondent however. They can assist in many ways, by enabling the basic metrics and standards, by (objectively) "aggregrating" metrics on my behalf, by storing or processing via HAAS'n'SAAS. I think the best thing that SAAS companies can do is contribute to OpenSource initiatives that enable end-users to view and tweak rep systems, and make their own inhouse rep systems compatible with others and accessable via APIs. Short-sighted companies will fight this, but they'll ultimately lose.