After Zephyr's previous posting about content for Deanster, I just wanted to give y'all a little more of my vision for the whole Deanster "user expression" piece. You're indubitably "the boss" on this one, so the call is yours, but I wanted to give you the whole nine yards.
The notion for this sprung from the fact that there's a wealth of ideas and content being created by the devotees of the Official Campaign Blog. Originally, I had thought of hacking Movable Type so that there would be a way for users to "concur" with other users' comments; to mark them as an idea, a phrase, a story worth saving. This way at the end of the day, you can have someone from your team browse through the 25 most "highlighted" posts.
Creating a way for the Official Site to grant recognition to stellar user participation will spur greater participation as well as greater quality.
From that came a discussion with Britt about how deanforamerica.com might be re-designed. I've attached an image of what he's come up with. It shows the idea pretty well: a quote from a participant for every section. This would be easy enough to set up if it were static, but my immediate thought was that it should be dynamic. It should be a rotation of many quotes, which will further drive participation as it shows that everyone has a chance of having their voice heard.
But for you to try and do this -- incorporate participant content -- requires some structure be built around it. So I thought of a facility on Deanster which would let you elicit on-topic quotes from your userbase; there would be some administrative overhead in terms of flagging content either as "worth highlighting" (good) or "administrative review" (bad), but this won't take much time at all. 90% of it can be done by users. Here's how:
1) Most of the content will be neither worth posting on DFA or worth badgering anyone about in terms of taking it down. The process I describe here will happen less than 10% of the time.
2) Objectionable content (e.g. explicit photos, objectionable statements) can be flagged by any user and quickly addressed by the moderation staff. If you create an environment that doesn't provide an opportunity to create entropy, then it won't happen. In other words, if people don't see bogus profiles, they're far less likely to try it themselves.
3) High-quality content can also be flagged by any user (though not for themselves), and dealt with in the same fashion.
4) Volunteer moderators (trusted participants) can further vet flagged content. People will kill to have this job. They can send warning letters to objectionable content posters and give a more seasoned "thumbs up" to high-quality profiles.
5) Finally, one staff member can invest an hour a day selecting the best of the best and flagging them as worthy of the DFA homepage. Likewise they can take the official action of booting people who don't respond to a warning letter. At this point were talking about 1% of total posts, so it's not really a lot of overhead.
Do we think this will cure a potential troll problem? IMHO, rigorous moderation is sufficient for stopping harmful BS. By giving users a "flag for review" button, you give them a means of doing something about trolls without feeding them.
cheers -josh
------------------------ Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
