In an email, Emi Miller got me thinking about the corrosive effect of competition and having winners and losers. This is a familiar idea to me and having winning messages is central to InterMix technology, but perhaps there are ways to reduce the competitiveness of the process without giving up the core notion of electing a message to represent a group.
The Voices of Humanity project is not about competition, but because we use ratings to determine "winning" messages, the competitive spirit naturally arises. This is a problem in several ways.
First, the competitive spirit tends to quell the sense of being in the same boat, which is what we are trying to build up, not dash.
Second, when there are many competitive participants, and only a couple winners, then most people are disappointed and there is fall-off in participation in the next round of the process.
Third, those who are aiming to win will tend to write similar messages, so the competition narrows the scope, making the whole process less interesting and therefore less valuable overall. There is less chance of a compelling innovative message being adopted to represent the group.
I wonder if we could use crowdfunding to give cash prizes not for the winning messages, but for the most interesting and most controversial messages. Such prizes would broaden the content and make the process more valuable overall. At the same time, not having a prize for simply winning would tell people that this is not really a competition even though there are winners. As a result, the competitive spirit would be diminished, which is good since we want people to look upon the process as fundamentally a cooperative project.
Any thoughts?
And again, we need your participation in the UNA Gender Crosstalk discussion: click the link below to go to the discussion. Please read and rate the messages there even if you do not write one of your own.
