How to Inspire 100 Social Action Mashups in 30 Days
Social Actions aggregates social change campaigns across dozens of online platforms, representing literally thousands of opportunities for people to get involved in the issues they care about. What the Social Actions API does is enable any developer to build web applications that connect people to ways to take action in decentralized, distributed, and user-friendly ways.
Over the summer, we built or initiated a number of applications that demonstrated that there are all sorts of ways to connect web users to actions – from WordPress Plugins to Twitter Mashups, to Widgets. Really, though, we only cracked the tip of the iceberg .
Now the question is: How do we unlock the creative potential of hundreds of developers around the world to build social action mashups that push the envelope and revolutionize how people discover and connect to actions across the web.
One idea Peter and I think might be the answer is a Developer contest.
Inspired to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, IdeaBlob, and other contests – What if we hosted a contest for the best web applications that pulled on the Social Actions API? What if we were able to roundup some sponsors to offer prizes – and the Social Actions community could vote on the best mashups to get the top prizes?
Peter also sparked an idea to recruit specific technology platforms for niche contests within and extending beyond the larger contest. For example, maybe Ning would sponsor a "mini-contest" for the best applications that mashed actions into the Ning platform. With similar contests for Firefox, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Google Maps, etc.
We're at the very early stages of this idea – and we wanted to share it as fast as possible with the Social Actions community. There's lots of questions that still need to be asked (and brain-stormed)...
Some questions:
- Approach: Is the contest idea the right approach to evangelize the API and inspire the next wave of social action mashups? Is late November/December a viable start date for the contest. How long should it run (30 days? - hence the title) Who will sponsor the contest? What are the kinds of prizes that will really get the attention of rock-star developers? What fields would the application proposal include? How would the proposals be organized in the contest gallery?
- Technology: Is the best approach to integrate the contest into the Social Actions community site (powered by Ning) If so, are there Ning or OpenSocial modules that we could use so as not to re-invent the wheel? If Ning'ing isn't the best way to go, what are the other top alternatives?
- Voting: Should the community vote on the best mashups for the major prizes – or should it be a combination of community votes and judges? How do we ensure it's not just a popularity contest – and the best apps win.
Lots of questions! Is there one that stands out? What are the questions we missed? Please share your ideas in the comments - We'll also keep you posted as we continue to develop the contest idea.
Tags: socialactions
Comment
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Comment by JoeSolomon on October 14, 2008 at 4:44pm
- That would be way awesome! I remember when we submitted the Knowmore.org Firefox Extension to the Extend Firefox 3 Contest - the judges included Mike Beltzner (Mozilla's User Experience Expeter) and Gina Trapini (LifeHacker) -- and that was waaaay exciting just knowing our extension would be reviewed by these leading thinkers and do'ers in the field!
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Comment by Britt Bravo on October 14, 2008 at 4:32pm - Also, I think if you get groovy judges, and reveal who they are in your contest outreach, that is a selling point for people to submit something--that someone they admire will look at it.
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Britt - Great points - Thanks for sharing. I agree with you about not launching in November and early December. January may be a better month to launch in - maybe we could even wrap it around a New Year's resolution!
About voting, I also agree with you - especially that a team of judges needs to be involved. If judges are involved, this would make it easier for the community as well. I remember when Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about the N2Y3 selection process:
"Only a masochist would brave the interface for voting on the best of all 120+ entrants.."
We might want to shoot for something more like Google's 10 to the 100th:
Q: How will you decide which ideas to fund?
A: A selection of Google employees will review all the ideas submitted and select 100 for public consideration. The 100 top ideas will be announced on January 27, 2009, at which point we will invite the public to select twenty semi-finalists. An advisory board will then choose up to five final ideas for funding and implementation. We plan to announce these winners in early February
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Comment by Britt Bravo on October 14, 2008 at 10:48am
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Hey Joe - I don't think you should launch the contest in late November, early December. When I used to work for an event production company, we never scheduled events during that time. The saying was, "Don't compete with Santa." Also, people are super busy during that time, but who has anything going on in January?
RE: voting. Personally, I think you get more higher quality projects in the end when you have a team of judges weed through the first round of submissions, but then let your community vote for the vetted projects.
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