Building Blocks

Intelligent Scoring is about discovering and sharing value.  The observation and interpretation of huge numbers of events behind the scenes in an active community allows the engine (the “Content Valuation Engine”, or CVE, that does the work of Intelligent Scoring) to make value judgements about the content and users in the community.  We call this process “valuation”. 

Valuation is how Intelligent Scoring works.  It is required.  The process of valuation results in values for a small set of key value indicators, we call “Building Blocks”.  There are three such building blocks — score, credibility and proficiency — each of which plays a role in indicating how valuable content and members in the community are.

Score is the easy example.  Let’s say you publish a blog entry, forum post, video or some other piece of content into the community.  You’ve categorized it, so it’s easier for people to find.  And a set of search indices have been updated behind the scenes, so searching will now include your new content item.  But what else happens?  Many times, not much.  Maybe the number of views or downloads is tracked, or people get to vote on how well they like what you’ve created.  But that’s about it.  Other than that, if you find it in a search, great.  Otherwise, you’re alone with your “My Library” content list.

Not so in the world of Intelligent Scoring.  Rather than just relying on a clever search to dig up your newly submitted item, the CVE monitors it.  Every activity relating to you or your item is tracked (even inactivity is observed), and each time something happens (or doesn’t happen), the engine interprets what’s going on and modifies the content item’s “score”.  Fast forward a week or two or three.  Someone in the community wants to know about all the content in a certain category (a question about red wines or a comment about a specific make and model of something-or-other).  Once that context is set, the community platform displays all the related content.  But in what order?  Well, if you assume that the valuation mechanism has been working properly behind the scenes, then just sort by score — descending.  Might sound too good to be true, but the fact is that a single numeric indicator of value is all you need.  If you trust how the engine arrived at the number, then all you need to know is…  the larger the number, the better.  Simple.

This is what we call “content item score”, or “score” for short … a single numeric indicator representing the value of a content item, given the process of Intelligent Scoring.  This value “contains” the history of all the observation and interpretation of actions in the community involving this content item.

But we don’t stop there.  Understanding the score of the content item is good.  But if you buy into the vision of community I proposed last week or if you believe that the social network created in online community is important, then you would agree that it’s also important to consider the value of the members of the community — not just what they’ve produced.  In the same way that the Intelligent Scoring engine observes and interprets activity to make value judgments about the content in the community, it makes similar decisions — leading to similar value indicators — about the community’s members.

First, the process defines a value indicator called “credibility”.  Credibility is a single numeric value – like score, only applied to a member not a content item — which represents the value of a member of the community.  Credibility is designed to represent aspects of the member’s character, such as their initiative, their integrity, and their commitment to the community.  Like an item’s score, this value contains the history of all the observation and interpretation of actions in the community involving this member.  In a sense, credibility is a member’s score.

Score and credibility get us pretty far down the path, but one more indicator is needed.  A person’s initiative and character are not the same as their knowledge of a particular topic.  So, in addition to credibility, a proficiency indicator is tracked by the CVE for every member of the community, with regard to each node in the knowledge taxonomy.  This value, also an historic set of observations and interactions, is called “proficiency”.  The more someone knows about a topic, the higher their proficiency indicator for that topic.

Score, credibility and proficiency form the three building blocks for intelligent scoring.  In nerd-speak, they are both the inputs and the outputs of every valuation equation … and will be central to our discussion as we carry it forward.

Technorati tags: valuation, score, content item score, credibility, proficiency