Idea Exchange Priorities

[JackDunaway]

Alright, this is just a teaser. I've been working on creating a UI that will make this experiment easier. So far, I just have the WebCrawling to gather the current Ideas from public HTTP finished. That's phase 1. (I have uploaded all Ideas that have at least 1 Kudos as a tsv for your charting pleasure!)

Phase 2 involves creating a UI that will display the Ideas and allow you to choose and invest in your favorites. This viewer will have filtering and sort capabilities, and will also launch weblinks in your default browser. When you save your investments, it will go into a binary (encrypted?) file containing your name (NI account number, for instance mine is 88938)*, the ideas and amounts you are investing in. ~30% complete

Phase 3 will involve automating the Phase 1 WebCrawl to a nightly routine. It will upload a digest of that day's Ideas (basically what I uploaded as this tsv) to a central internet FTP server as a binary (encrypted?) file, and clients (the Phase 2 Viewer/Investment Allocator) will connect to the internet to grab this digest. I intend on "releasing" the "Idea Viewer" for feedback after Phase 3 is complete, even though the Investments are only saved to local disk. 0% complete

Phase 4 will involve actually uploading your investments to an internet database, and this is the tricky part. I know very little about connecting to online database servers, let along writing a web service that will handle database requests. Could anyone point me to some good references?? (It'll be a MySQL database. I know SQL well enough to write the queries - it's the connections that are fuzzy to me). This will also include transferring the location of the digest into the database rather than just an FTP site.

Phase 5 will involve writing a web service that compiles all data (investments) uploaded from each user, and presents it somehow. The data will be compiled as each new investment entry comes in. I don't know if I want the UI online, or as part of the Viewer/Allocater. Also, I don't know if it will be just a static leaderboard, or interactive with sorts and filters (interactive would constitute Phase 6).

Regardless if anyone uses this tool or not, it's starting as a fun exercise doing some things I've never done before. Please leave feedback on your thoughts and ideas.

[tst]

I don't have any experience with the DB over the web part, but you could use a dynamic DNS service to get your machine to have a fixed address. You can then host the DB on that machine and have the program connect to it.

As for the viewer, NI currently has a pilot for a product which can compile LV-like code to a Silverlight application. You may want to look into that if you want to learn yet another tool.

[JackDunaway]

I'm aware of the Silverlight thing, and it's a good idea for maybe like Phase 7 or 8, but I don't think I'll go that far.

I've thought about using personal hardware for hosting the DB, but I'm a little concerned about uptime. It would certainly be easier, and I may go that route for the first phase, but I would eventually like to learn how to talk to a web service that interfaces with an web-hosted database. I will scour the forums and help documents/examples unless someone can first point me in the right direction. (Really, if you're reading this and interested in what I'm doing and you've done anything remotely similar, post your experience! I'll be hitting that phase pretty soon, and it would be nice to hit the ground running)

By the way, Phase 2 is about 50% complete, and I have decided to adjust your initial "pocketbook" based on post count, not years as a developer. This is a hard piece of data that can be grabbed from the forum, so it should provide more reliable figures.

If anyone has any suggestions, by all means, I'm open.

[tst]

I also got another idea - maybe ideas which were submitted more than once need to get an extra boost somehow. The reasoning is that if this is something that bothered people enough to think about it and post it, it's probably something that should be looked at.

[JackDunaway]

I think this type of a grouping of "duplicate" ideas and "inherited" support (Kudos) might be a little hard to automatically implement - there's not a clear link between duplicate ideas from my HTTP point of view. Maybe it could be another feature where the community actually submits groups of duplicates, and others confirm or deny those groupings?

I agree, handy feature, but it'll take some thought.

Quick update: I'm shocked at the power and simplicity of Datasocket. How could I have been ignoring it in favor of the Internet Toolkit all these years? It is cleanly handling FTP transfers, (and it is FASTER than the Internet Toolkit for FTP transfers) and I have some ideas on how to implement the client/server database connection. 65% on Phase 2.

[Henrik_Volkers]

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tst wrote:
I also got another idea - maybe ideas which were submitted more than once need to get an extra boost somehow. The reasoning is that if this is something that bothered people enough to think about it and post it, it's probably something that should be looked at.

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The metric I have in mind for an email is 40:1.   40 people get annoyed ... one will write an email. So maybe every entrance should be already valued with 40 Kudos (Jacks limit will raise to 60)

[JackDunaway]

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Henrik Volkers wrote:

The metric I have in mind for an email is 40:1.   40 people get annoyed ... one will write an email. So maybe every entrance should be already valued with 40 Kudos (Jacks limit will raise to 60)

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Henrik, could you explain that a little more?

[Henrik_Volkers]

Hi Jack,

first thank you for your efforts and stats. 

I just wanted to point out that a single idea itself has (should have) a bias value. Is the value of an idea with 20 Kudos twice of one with 10 Kudos?

Beside  that the value of an idea is really hard to define most of the time 😉

The value 40:1 came from customer service workshop and might be specific for that (mass) product. However I have no feeling for the dark mass of LabVIEW programmers/users, I'm dazzled by this forum.

[JackDunaway]

Kicking around another idea based on the following reality: just because someone has a lot of Kudos or posts doesn't mean I respect their opinion proportionally more than someone with fewer Kudos or posts.

I'm thinking about introducing one more feature that would allow users to select 10 other members whose opinion they respect the most. Anytime another member places your name on their Top 10 list, your "reputation" increases by a point, and thus places a heavier weighting on your "investments". Basically, the idea is this: the community's most respected participants get the most weight on their investments. Everyone's top 10 list would be confidential, but every user's reputation would be public. This idea is an attempt to address the fact that I know some individuals who have fewer hard metrics (Kudos, posts), but I would still like to see their investments count more.

What do you think? Would this be a useful tool if implemented well, or is it a trap that could harmfully inflate/deflate users? Like I said, just kicking around concepts, reply with thoughts.

[tst]

I like this suggestion. It provides smarts which can never be achieved using automated metrics.