Earning Reputation Points

Earning Reputation Points

Brainify is very new. In order to turn this site into a great student resource, it needs to have a strong collection of great academic websites, and it needs members. So right now the greatest need of this community is to grow its user base and the number of collected websites.

As such, recommending Brainify to a friend and being the first to collect useful websites are the two fastest routes to a high reputation. But remember, your reputation is only increased when your recommended friends contribute to the community, or when other members show that they’ve found the sites you’ve collected to be useful. Read on for details of how your reputation is built.

We try our best to align the reputation calculation to be consistent with growing the best possible site for University and College students. The community needs will change over time, and I expect the reputation emphasis to change along with it. At the time of writing, you earn reputation points roughly as follows:

• When people you recommend join Brainify, for every 4 points they have, you get one point. It is important that they indicate you as their recommender - you will not start collecting these points until they do.
  
• If you were the first to collect a certain website in Brainify, you earn points every time other users demonstrate that it is useful to the community. For example, you earn a point every time someone else adds it to their collection. You also earn points if it is rated highly, or can lose points if it is rated very poorly.
• If you were the first to categorize a website as belonging to a particular topic, you gain points if the community feels it is an appropriate categorization, and may lose points if the community feels it is a poor or inappropriate categorization.
• If you make a comment about a site, you earn points every time someone rates the comment highly, or lose points if it is rated very poorly.
• If you create a group that the community finds to be useful, you can gain a large number of points.
• If you answer someone’s question, you earn a lot of points if the answer is rated highly. Although you won’t lose points for a poorly rated answer, you won’t gain any either.
• If you are the first to use a tag to describe some website, and others use the same tag (i.e. they agree that you've made an intelligent choice), you get points for that.
• If you ask a question, you get points every time it is rated highly.
• Finally, you get points if you place an image in your profile, and if you indicate your year level and academic category (what degree or diploma you are working on) in your profile.

That's it for now. As I say, this almost certainly will change over time. If we manage to grow this site into something useful with a large community of members, my intention is to form a working group of intelligent and unbiased brainify members and academics to manage the reputation governance. As much as possible, this should be done by the community - not one person.

Take care - Murray

How Might You Benefit from PCO?

The philosophy of PCO (Pseudo Community Ownership) and its connection to reputation have been described in previous postings, but I wanted to say a bit more about some of the mechanics of PCO here.

A Quick Overview

We want to do everything we can to get this community up and going and to ensure that the members who contribute get something back if the site is ever sold. To that end, if Brainify is ever sold, we intend to distribute 30% of the proceeds of sale to Brainify community members in proportion to their reputation. See the links above if you want to understand better why we chose to do this or how reputation impacts it.

We Will Make Mistakes – I Am Sure

This initially seemed like a pretty straight-forward idea when it occurred to me, but on further reflection and after consultation with legal experts, this turns out to be somewhat complicated. In addition, we could find no precedent for it. Therefore we had to build the idea from scratch and make a lot of decisions without the benefit of some good history and experience to go on. What this says to me is that we are almost certain to make mistakes in the execution of PCO. When we discover those mistakes, I will endeavor to do what I think is most fair, and will try to rely on legal and ethics experts, where it is appropriate, to help us rectify those mistakes.

How Will We Calculate What You Get?

We intend for the basic calculation to be as follows:

Your Proceeds = Net Proceeds of Sale X 30% X (Your reputation Points / Total Reputation Points of All Members).

Costs of sale

Here are some additional details. First – net proceeds are net of all costs associated with the sale. Sale costs often include things like legal costs, accounting costs, etc. These normally come out of the proceeds due to shareholders, but in this case the community will also have to bear their fair share of those costs. So the 30% that we hope to distribute will be 30% of what all the shareholders would otherwise actually receive – not 30% of the actual sale price. Having said that, these costs of sale are not typically huge in relation to the sale price.

Costs of Distribution

Next, if this happens, there will be a cost associated with actually getting the money to the members. You can imagine what they are, but included are things like establishing contact with each member, collecting the necessary paperwork, doing the accounting, issuing cheques, mailing the cheques, etc. There are companies that do that work and the likely scenario is that we would hire such a company. This would give us the advantage of knowing the exact costs associated with distribution. Again – not necessarily huge costs, but they do exist and will have to come out of whatever amount the community members actually receive.

Some amounts May be Too Small

Depending on the distribution of reputation points and the proceeds of sale, there may be a number of community members whose proceeds are very small – perhaps close to, or smaller than the actual cost of getting the proceeds to them. Because of that, we intend to have a cutoff amount. If the calculated proceeds for a particular member are too small to justify sending them to that member, then we won’t send them. This may result in an unspent pool of money which will be donated to a charity. We can determine the mechanism for selecting the charity(s) if and when that happens, but I intend to make the process participatory, open and transparent.

Some People May be Impossible to Pay

It may also be the case that there are members who we feel should be paid, but for whatever reason we cannot pay them. Reason’s might include us being unable to reach them via their registered contact information, or perhaps they are living in a country which makes it impossible or administratively impractical to send them funds. In those cases they, too, are unlikely to be paid and the money that they would otherwise get will be added to the charitable pot mentioned above.

Other Issues

There are also situations which complicate sales such as, for example, the sale not being for cash but instead being for shares in another company. In that case we likely could not make a distribution until the shares are liquid (could be sold). Another example is a sale for cash where not all of the cash comes at the same time, or where a portion of the proceeds are dependant on future performance. Since the number and combination of potential scenarios make it impossible to make firm plans which address every possible outcome, it is impossible to promise anyone exactly what will happen in the event of a sale. But I can assure you that my intentions are clear: to distribute 30% of the cash the shareholders actually receive by way of sale as soon as practical after the sale - and that the company will do everything reasonably within our power to ensure that intention is carried out.

As Open as Possible

To that end, one other thing I intend to do in the event of a sale (assuming the size of the sale warrants it) is to have a trusted body – typically an accounting firm – oversee the process of calculating and distributing the proceeds to the community. The intent here is to make the process as open as possible without compromising the privacy of individuals. A trusted body will be able to make a public declaration that the calculations were done correctly and that the correct amounts were distributed.

Anyhow – all of these intentions are planned and considered as much as we reasonably could at this stage in the company. I know we will make mistakes and will encounter obstacles we had not planned for. But we will do our very best to stay true to the intent of PCO and will be asking the community for advice along the way – which you can contribute now if you have any, by posting a comment below.

Thanks so much and take care - Murray

A Strong Focus on Reputation

You may have noticed that Brainify places a huge emphasis on member reputation. In fact, reputation is so important that we maintain a numerical approximation of each member’s reputation and display it along with their profile.

Why the Emphasis on Reputation?

Reputation is critically important in Brainify. There are a few reasons for this.

Who can You Trust?

First, this is an academic community. Ideally, then, when reading a comment or an answer to a question posted by some member, there is some way to determine whether this person does, or does not, know what they are saying. A lot of the clues are embodied in the comment or answer itself, but it would be nice to be able to “ask” the community about this person. That is one place reputation comes in. If the member’s reputation summary in Brainify is high, this is a good indication that the community at large generally values the contributions of this member and perhaps you can trust what they say a bit more than what is said by members with a lower reputation.

Who Can You Learn From?

Second, Brainify is meant to be a very open site. As such, things like and individual’s group membership and content collections are open for the community to view. Browsing the site for members with high reputations who are pursuing similar academic goals allows us to connect with others we “respect”. It is possible that if they have a high standing in the community, we are more likely to find their collections to be of value to us. As such, the numerical reputation allows us another way of finding people who we can benefit from in our education.

To Estimate Contribution to the Brainify Community

Finally – reputation is critical in Brainify because of our desire to reward people who help build the community. As I have said elsewhere, communities like this are of little value to anyone until there is a critical mass of members and content. But that critical mass is difficult to build because there is little reason to come to the site before it is built. This is still true, to a lesser extent, once the site is up and going – we want to give some incentive to people to keep the needs of the community in mind when they are collecting, commenting, answering, etc. As such, we record a numerical reputation value. Although it will certainly be an imperfect approximation, we will do the best we can to be logical and fair. It is this value that we intend to use, if the site is ever sold, to share the proceeds of sale with those community members who have contributed to the community.

But all this begs the question of how we determine the reputation value for a member.

It Isn’t Us, It’s You!

First of all, let me say that it is our intent from the beginning to, as much as possible, let the community decide what a member’s reputation should be. That makes sense – why would we (Brainify management) decide? You know what is of value to you a whole lot better than we do. Therefore, all of the inputs to determining reputation come from the community members - not us. For example, the rating of a comment or some web site will affect the reputation of the member who made that comment or who first collected that web site. If someone recommends that a friend join Brainify, and that friend ends up establishing a high reputation (due to community input), the recommender will benefit since he or she brought something of value to the community. Likewise if someone starts a group, and that group is very active, that will affect the reputation of the group founder. You get the idea.

OK – As Much as I try, it is not Entirely You

Having said that, we (Brainify) still had to make some decisions about how the reputation will be calculated and what contributes to a member's reputation. Unfortunately, this means that we will have some impact on the reputation itself. This is unfortunate – we honestly want no part in determining reputation. I want to leave it entirely to the community. But there needs to be a framework or algorithm that is applied to take the various inputs from the community (ratings, etc) and coalesce them into a single number. We have taken our best stab at such an algorithm and have implemented it. However, there is no doubt in my mind that we will find this algorithm flawed or inconsistent with community goals in many ways. Recognizing this leads to two results.

The Reputation Algorithm Will Change

First – we reserve the right to (in fact, almost guarantee that we will) change the algorithm from time to time. Our intent is that new implementations will not affect past rating points accumulation (except perhaps in cases of gross error), but will affect the calculation of newly acquired points going forward.

Reputation Governance?

Second, because I want to divest the company of influencing reputation, it is my plan to establish a committee of respected educators, ethics experts and community members to take over the governance of the reputation algorithm. In this way, the committee can take into account the desires of the community and make logical decisions where conflicting goals arise. Also – it will remove the company from any potential or apparent conflict. I plan to do this as soon as the size of the community is sufficient to interest high caliber committee members in joining.

The charter for the committee would include the following goals:

• Fairness to individual members
• Consistency with the goal of building the most useful and vibrant community possible
• Consistency with the goal of appealing to the widest range of students in University and College around the world.

Those are the goals that we have been trying to adhere to and would be a part of any governance charter going forward.

For more information, you may want to check out Brainify's Contributos Participation Policy found on the Brainify site with the Terms of Use and other legal documents.

This is one area where input is especially welcome. Please let me know what you think.

Take care - Murray

The Philosophy of Pseudo Community-Ownership (PCO)

One of the many things that excites me about Brainify is the idea of community ownership. Now technically the community does not own part of Brainify. While that was my first idea, discussions with lawyers showed that to be a logistical and legal near-impossibility. So we intend to do the next best thing – and I want to discuss that here. Because I have not seen it done before (which does not mean it has not been done – only that I’ve not seen it done), I had to make up a name for this thing which is kind of, but really not ownership. So lets call it Pseudo Community Ownership (or PCO for short).

The most concise definition I can give for PCO is this: “In the event of a sale, the intent of PCO is to share sale proceeds with the community members in proportion to the contribution made by each member to that community”. There is a lot more to it – but more on that later.

This posting talks about the philosophy of PCO that brought me to experiment with it. A better definition of PCO and how we are implementing it are described in another post.

What About the Contributors?

Sites like Brainify have different kinds of users. The vast majority of users come to such sites to search, browse, and otherwise find what they are looking for. They probably join, build a bit of a profile, and make a comment or two as well. But other than that – they are not major contributors to building the site.

A small percentage of users of such sites are responsible for making the vast majority of the contributions to the site. According to Ochoa and Duval [1], depending on the site, the top 10% of users make something between 40 and 90% of the contributions. I suspect each such person has a different reason for making their contributions, but the fact is that the vast majority of the users of the site would have nothing to come to if it were not for these uber-contributors.

It has always bothered me that when a community site is sold, as they often are, the uber contributors – those whose contributions were instrumental in the success of the site and the community, received no benefit. Perhaps this is not tragic – there was no expectation of compensation going in – and for many the mere act of contributing is compensation in itself. However, everyone else does benefit. The 90%+ of users benefit from the wonderful free resource. The business owners benefit from the sale. But the large contributors are kind of left out.

What really got me thinking about this was the sale of YouTube. YouTube is a great success. There is a huge community of users who benefit in one way or another from the availability of videos. Also - at the time of the sale, the founders did very well by all accounts. But what about the people who put the videos up there? Well – they did benefit by the availability of a free and convenient forum that enabled their “voice” to be heard, but that was it. It seemed, to me, that the benefit was not in proportion to the contribution they made to the community.

What About Building the Community?

We all know that community based sites need to actually have a community before they can thrive. One of the basic requirements of building a community is that you have to have a reason for people to join. Sometimes that reason is the site itself. But more often, the reason is the other users and what they bring to the site. In this latter case, it is difficult to build a community until you already have a community. So where do you begin?

One way is to try and create an early incentive for people to join. Something that will start to build the community before the draw of the community itself takes over.

PCO Might Help Answer Those Questions

At first, when I thought about the idea of PCO, it struck me as a little crass and overtly commercial. I even felt a bit embarrassed telling people about the idea. As a former faculty member, I am very cautious about commercial influences on education. Perhaps the idea of PCO was so commercial that it would damage the “purity” (or at least the perceived purity) of a site that is meant to be all about academia. There has always been an uncomfortable relationship between commercialism and academia, and having been a faculty member for 10 years and the founder of WebCT, I have had a front row seat to a wide variety of opinions on the matter. But the simple fact is that many of the wonderful things we have that impact our daily educational activities would not exist were it not for companies developing ideas and taking risks to see those ideas realized.

The more I thought about PCO, the more I realized that it fit with my idea of what is “right” in terms of the potential to compensate community contributors. It filled in that last gap – now there is potential for all parties to benefit. It also has the potential to help bootstrap the community; there may be people out there who will view PCO as an added incentive to spend a bit of time and contribute things to the community in the early stages of its development.

I am still nervous about the idea. For me, Brainify is about education – what we get out of university and college. I do not want the idea of PCO to overshadow this focus. And since we have no precedent for PCO I worry about the mistakes we will make along the way defining it and implementing it – and how those mistakes could hurt Brainify. But at the same time, I am a fanatical believer in the potential for a site like this to be of huge benefit to students in their educational experience. As such, I want to do everything I can to see the site support a vibrant educational community and to see all members benefit. From that perspective – perhaps PCO makes sense.

Take care - Murray

[1] Quantitative Analysis of User-Generated Content on the Web, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Understanding Web Evolution, April 22, 2008