A crash course in changing the world.
This is a comment I made to a blog post by Win The Planet Alexandru.
I felt it can stand alone so am moving it here.
If a game offers rewards, tangible ones like points, scholarships, honours , educational ceriticates for completing the course and awards AS EVOKE DOES - people are going to try for those, whether it's considered ok or not by the community.
A system with a heirarchy and a game which can be won or prizes that can be won where evoke admins can also judge occasionally and give extra points and boosts to a player for achievements like getting featured, having a post featured, becoming hero of the week, getting special mention etc.,is a heirarchical system at work and naturally leaders will emerge based on meritocracy which means they offer proof of having mustered superior learning skills, gaming or playing skills, problem solving, collaboration, resourcefulness, sustaining power, participation , entrepreneurship etc.
However if it is an evening out that you need or normalization things could be done in a different way by group reviews and peer reviews and not just evoke reviewing our work on a quick basis. Evoke tried to do this indirectly by bringing in power votes , having evoke mentors and saying our work will be reviewed.
But because of the explosion of members of which I'm sure only a 1000 may be really doing the course or playing the game properly neither evoke nor the mentors, or the game players are able to do full justice to what has to be done.
It is nobody's fault really.
Some views expressed on here are not accurate - power votes and other rewards collected by anyone here are not a form of money or a bizarre anomaly but the result of a huge share of time investment, dedication and managerial skills, energy and hard work and by themselves they do not create a rich, middle class or socially poor division - as an aside, nobody here is getting a million votes that I know of and while hyperbole is an effective form of figurative speech if anyone did get that he would have spent lots of actual money on this project rather than the project spending money on him - we must not confuse reality with virtuality.
What I would like to suggest
1. Points should be added to people according to how many blogs they have read and commented on seriously and even here impartial review would need to be done not just on how many pics, videos and blogs they have posted and got others to read to garner votes but on the quality.
2. Instead of a leader cloud we could have an agent cloud which has the names of all the agents - we have only a list - and also there it would show his contribution starting with in terms of participation - as a power generator , that is, how many blogs read and seriously commented on, how many other agents has he mentioned seriously in his work with the intention of also drawing attention to their work , how many collaborative projects has been taken part in by him, how much has he or she encouraged and helped and shared genuinely of knowedge ,resources etc on here...
3. This would again produce leaders but a set that would "become' mentors and their participation would have an effect on networks they create where the others also feel welcome, needed, appreciated, loved etc so they would blossom in their own time...
You cannot avoid the rise of leaders like Jane , any more than you can ensure there are no loners or camp followers, you can only minimize the impact by ensuring an increase in the number of leaders , maximizing the amount of participation by all and not the numbers of participation and letting strong individuals who are likely to be loners carve out their own niche in the society so that they feel comfortable too.
As for the leader cloud I know I'm high up there but I don't total my points, and I still use it like I used the earlier one to keep in touch and to find new people though nowadays i do it more through evoke email, the sidebar, random search and by folowing links in blogs posts in comments to related topics
or going to profile pages adding friends and reading their posts etc....
If the points were virtual money and I could give them away like the game runners, or trade and barter or exchange them for things i wanted like particular power votes I would bother, but now it's irrelevant , it will not win me the game and does not seem to get me readers.
A search would be a useful option as in Google where topics searched for lead to links and evoke does have that to some extent, I don't know why people don't use it.....
I also wish there were proper apps for chat (Samiran made one but i've been using chatango on three sites now and it is not working so well for me here) , adding polls (again Samiran's idea, not mine), wikis and even music so it's more a social networking site and a better kind of a competitive game and an educational enterprise.
I'm sure in evoke 2.0 we will see a better version
I also wish the design team would also come up with a cleaner version, honestly, the design is a bit cluttered and claustrophobic.
Why not lighter colours, colourfulness , playfulness would liven up the place as would power votes for humour and a graffiti wall or some such space for rebels (read ,resident dissidents like me) as Turil and Michele Baron suggested once etc....
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