I think we look at this issue from a different perspective which is captured in a statement I made in a different post …

http://www.achievemarketleadership.com/?p=51

My statement is “If Dell knows what target markets they are focused upon as a company (or even within product lines), and they can map these new ideas to those target markets, then they can force-rank ideas so that a great idea is defined as one that helps them serve the needs of their most important target markets.”

Another way of saying this is — it’s not just community input we want, it’s input from the specific community we are targeting to sell to.

Here’s wishing you luck with Banktastic.

Ron referred me to your post and I thought I let you in on what we think about these topics.

As far as ensuring good ‘definition’ of the community, we have decided to put that control on the community. We have built features into Banktastic that allows anyone registered to be able to rate others comments or answers and by doing that not only does the system get smarter (better answers, faster) but it creates a natural attrition of bad comments/answers to fall to the bottom.

We also have the ability for anyone to ‘flag’ a person or comment. So by us giving the community these features we’ve enabled them to self-police themselves. We might be able to police the system ourselves today but at scale, there’s no chance of this so we wanted these concepts in early on in the development of Banktastic.

So in the event that we have a spammer, someone pushing their own agendas, or otherwise the users will rate or flag accordingly and we can handle those situations easily.

Also, it’s our belief that limiting Banktastic by some pre-defined criteria not only hinders the usefulness of the system (the collective intelligence model) but also drastically reduces a certain serendipity to naturally occur. And we would NEVER want to stop that.

Feel free to email me directly if you have any more questions/comments/thoughts, thanks!

Thanks for the referral Ron!

I like what I saw. My favorite part is the Q&A approach.

I also like the idea of enabling people to invite others. My only concern would be how do they ensure that those that join meet the strict criteria that defines that community?

In our view, it’s critical to make sure that when you choose to listen to people, you know you’re listening to the right people.

1) They initially invited a bunch of people they knew to join, and gave each invitee the ability to invite 2 other people (so they kept it self-limiting, but not too exclusive). Personally, I’ve still held on to one of my invites.

2) They created a “Q&A” core construct. Meaning, community members often pose questions to the community for feedback, input, and discussion. Sometimes they’re work-related questions, other times just questions geared to generating discussion.

The community has a good “feel” to it (i.e., like-minded members), and the content is interesting. Can’t beat that, eh?