As part of our Beta test we granted wishes mid-week, just to test the entire process at least once before we officially launch Wed Nov 8th - and the results?
A flight for my girlfriend to come to Calgary from Ontario for my X-mas party - $200
Me, myself and I, submitted by martyb
Car repairs- $200
Twist of fate, submitted by areleneb
My cat to be healthy - $200
Health and wellness, submitted by kirsten&steve
A cool PC with a copy of Photoshop - $200
Weekly Wish: anything computer related, submitted by matte
** This wish is from one our community members to another
To send my mom to a spa for a day - $200
Help me help others, submitted by anitaw
For everyone else that submitted wishes, don’t worry, your wishes are still in the running for the next distribution of funds on Nov 8th.
For those of you that haven’t submitted wishes yet - what are you waiting for?
This blog is shown as video and regular text. They are pretty much the same so you can take your pick on which medium you prefer.
Video Blog
Same thing in text
Hi all,
Yesterday I got some questions from community members asking where the Golden Axe tournament ideas came from. If we are following the wisdom-of-crowds (WOC) why weren’t the top 16 ideas automatically entered into the tournament?
I want to respond to that question, as well as shed some light on how ideas were selected for the last two tournaments, and challenges we face with our current voting system.
Challenges with current system
We have a very cool early adopter community. Our people are passionate, bright, smart, and enthusiastic about their ideas. They love to try new stuff and aren’t afraid of being different.
As much as we love our early adopters, we know to get a good WOC vote on commercial products we need to include more people of greater diversity. We don’t have that today, and a challenge for us going forward is to grow the community to a diversified sample size large enough where we feel we have a good handle on whether an idea will sell in the market place.
We also have a lot of down voting going on ;( It’s natural for people to want their idea(s) to do well. But what’s not great is when they insincerely score other peoples ideas low, in an attempt to make their score relatively higher. It breaks the voting model making it hard for us to know which ideas to choose.
That leaves us with a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. We want the crowd to steer us towards compelling product ideas, but we haven’t yet delivered an effective voting mechanism to do that yet.
How to fix
I would be lying if I told you each of these problems will be easy to fix over night. To get the diversity we need in the voting, we are going to have to attract as diverse as community as possible. Many of these people typically won’t be power users like our current community members. By power user I mean these people may never submit an idea. They would only ever come to www.ideawarz.com and vote each week.
This diversity and growth in numbers is important because it’s the best way I know of dealing with the down vote problem. More people, fairly and accurately telling us which ideas they like, and which they don’t, will eventually turn any down voting into noise.
I have flirted with karma based systems to induce people into voting higher, but I don’t want to create the opposite phenomena of people just voting high, so they can exchange karma for a t-shirt.
Removing the down vote option, growing and diversifying the community, and believing people are trustworthy are still my preferred options here. Marketing campaigns, turning some of you into millionaires will go a long way to attracting people (which is why I am so pumped and excited about Gwabs – pre-order now!).
How were ideas chosen for the tournaments
For the first tournament, Golden Hammer, we took many of the top ranked ideas and entered them into the tournament. We knew would couldn’t systematically take the top 16 (for reasons above), but we wanted to get as many of them as we could.
On Golden Axe we tried something different. Once we got out of the top 16, it became much more fuzzy to us which ideas the community and we liked best. With over 3000 ideas submitted we knew there were diamonds in the rough there, so we expanded our search.
We were amazed at what we found. Buried deep in the idea pool were some wonderful, creative, innovative ideas that had never seen the light of day. These were the types of ideas we were hoping community members would submit! What was frustrating was that we had to dig so deep for them.
Why the two different approaches? Because we are still trying to figure how to which ideas stand the best chance in the market place (in the absence of a WOC voting system we are comfortable with). We are working hard to get that system in place, but in the mean time we need to be flexible and adapt.
Which is why going forward you will not see the top 16 ideas automatically entered in to the tourney. We will always try to get as many in there as we can, but if we don’t see how some ideas can make money, or be viable commercial products, we will consider others.
We are looking at ways of allowing community members to pursue ideas on their own, but that is going to take time to setup and we are not there yet. Our IdeaForge will also give people much more guidance and direction in how to present their ideas as commercially viable products, and give them every chance of seeing the light of day. IdeaForge is still a couple of weeks away.
The joys of being early adopters
One of the joys (and frustrations) about being an early adopter is you get a first row seat to see all the bumps and bruises that occur along the way.
Many of you in the community right now are truly our early adopters. You are the power users. You submit ideas. You comment and vote on others. You participate in the forums. You are passionate, creative, and not afraid to be among the first. You are pioneers and explorers forging rivers where there are no bridges, and going where few have gone before.
Your feedback, thoughts, and intent are enabling us do something completely different, and without your input and participation we wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.
We still have some things to figure out (like effective WOC voting). Your patience, enthusiasm, and feedback are welcomed and appreciated. And we love that many of you already give it to us daily, whether we want to hear it or not
So keep givin’ it to us
I want to apologize for not communicating more. To be honest we are just overwhelmed. I know that’s a lame excuse. We have the vision; we know where we want to go. If only we didn’t have to eat and sleep we could get there a lot faster
In an effort to deliver our community more functionality and features, I sometimes forget the importance of communication and participating in things like the forums. Again, I vow to get better.
I also forget that many of you don’t see or here the debates we have internally about how best to get things done (some of them are pretty epic!). I am going to try and loop many of you in more and share some of the discussions we have.
So apologies for the confusion on this tournament idea selection. Drop me a line if you have any other questions (jr at cambrianhouse.com) or join us in the forums (IdeaWarz is near the bottom) and we can have it out there
If you liked the Golden Hammer, you are going to LOVE the Golden Axe. This months tournament has some of the biggest, baddest, coolest ideas ever assembled. Check out the creativity, and innovativeness of this months contestants:
Apologies for the delay. We ran into some resistance preparing for the tourney and as a result will be starting the tournament a day later. I know you are all chomping at the bit to see who are next contestants are - I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Look for the tournament to begin this afternoon (Thursday).
Cheers - JR
On a side note … for an excellent book on resistance, and how to overcome it, check out Steven Pressfields book The War of Art.
Have you ever had a day where nothing seems to be going your way?
You lock your keys in the car (for the second time that week).
You forget your laptop at home.
And you misplace your notes from an important meeting the previous day?
Then, just when you are ready to throw it all in for the day, a package arrives from an appreciative supporter of your cause. A package of the best, most delicious, gourmet chocolate chip cookies in the land.
That’s what happened yesterday.
A kind community member, M.E.P, was kind enough to send us a most welcome box of cookies with a kind note.
Dear Cambrian House,
Congrats on a successful Golden Hammer Tournament! Hopefully these cookies address your acute stomach-grumblies … Because you can’t induct yourselves into the Hall of Fame … I would make the observation you are already life long members – Leif Erickson be damned!
Thanks M.E.P.
Thank you M.E.P for brightening our day and sweetenin’ our tummies.
Every month we interview people in the community (like jill!) and ask them all sorts of silly things. Everything from who they think will go the distance in the tournaments, to what they would eat for their last meal. It’s our way of saying thanks to the people who make a difference in the community, and help make the community what it is.
Is there someone you think is deserving of an interview? Drop me a line and send me a private message.
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