Your redirect to helping people learn, on the other hand, seems very appropriate. You might even have saved me from writing gamification off completely!

[...]Persona Prime » Blog Archive » Motivation, incentives, perfectionism, fear[...]…

When I saw the citability.org premise laid out it made me think of an interesting feature in Freebase called as_of_time. I know from searching for “silona.org freebase” that you commented on their acquisition by Google (o_o) so perhaps you’ve heard of this API? But if not… it has the interesting property of being able to effectively rewind the whole corpus, getting the results of a query as if it were run back in time.

(See section “As Of Time Querying”)
http://www.freebase.com/docs/data/going_meta

I imagine that an unusually powerful citability demo could be built with an interface that used a Freebase-backed schema for the sections/pieces of government documents. Have you or anyone else considered this idea? (currently I get no hits for “citability.org freebase as_of_time”)

While Freebase is not open source, they don’t mind if you experiment in the sandbox. And although they clear the data out weekly you can just programmatically reload demo data when they do. Of course…given the “meta” nature of as_of_time in the graphd engine, “backdating” an edit time in an existing database is not offered, so each new upload would reflect new edit times. A real government project using this method would probably want to import their existing editing history and thus employ a mechanism like graphd’s, but not use Freebase itself.

Also: you seem to share some of my feelings about the tradeoffs of transparency and accountability. So I’d be very curious what you think of my Blackhighlighter project, if you have time to look at it! Feel free to send me any comments or send it on to anyone you know who might be interested.

Thanks!!!

And I need to do a post about that Sir Ken Robinson video… I have it on my to do list!

Will check out Alfie now!

Anyways if you want to dig more into the topic of intrinsic motivation I’d love to chat. My wife and I founded an entire school based on the concept, http://www.rawlearning.org/ One person I would highly recommend checking out more of would be Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn), his work is excellent because it is well researched and backed up with empirical data. He was way ahead of his time when he started publishing on this 20 yrs ago. Also, check out some of the later work of W. Edwards Deming. As for other TED-ish talks to check out, you might want to check out some of the talks from Sir Ken Robinson, this is a good one from RSA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I could talk forever on this topic but I think its best to shut up at this point. I like the direction you are going here and I’m off to check out “The 5th Discipline”.

Also, your comment about how you signed up for Jane’s games but never really got around to playing reminded me of this article about Netflix and procrastination from youarenotsosmart.com (link- http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/ ) I see some parallels to your arguments about gaming choices and the procrastination study. BTW-I highly recommend that you check out the rest of that blog, if you have never encountered it before, I think you would really like it.

Also, post more often please