Folks against Genetically Modified Seeds and Food
Raising awareness about the impacts of Genetically Modified Seeds and Food
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Mar 01, 2009
Updated: Oct 13, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Implemented - 'Scan My Profile: Who should I know and connect to' tool +7
Implemented: We've put in two new features on a user's dashboard that recommends people and content. One is the "People you may know tool", and the other is "What's New on WiserEarth", which is configurable to only pull in content that matches a user's interests, keywords, or geographic location.
---------------------------------
Problem: Building on Related Organizations, People Who Viewed This Also Viewed... suggestion, we need to help foster connections between organizations and between people. It's simply too hard to find information. Part of the point of WE is to foster collaboration through putting people in touch with one another.
Suggestion: Some sort of artificial intelligence that reviews a user's browser history and user profile to recommend other people, organizations, groups, etc that should be of interest to them. I.e. instead of requiring the user to actively search we serve them up the connections to follow-up on. My bias would be to focus on connecting 'live entities' such a people, orgs and groups.
This could be like 'Amazon recommends' or where Linked-in or Facebook say these 'Could be / or should be your friends'. Some other sites place the user graphically in the center of a big bullseye with all those around him/her at distances and different directions representing how much they share interests. Finally once these connections are made how do we help foster them? What tools and advice can we give to get people, groups, orgs actively collaborating? In network terminology the concept is called Structural Equivalence and there are software packages out there that could easily analyse the WiserEarth dataset to make these recommendations.
Comments (1 - 6 of 6)
|
|
|
|
It's something I will have to run by our developers to gauge the difficulty of creating an algorithm to handle this recommendation process. If there are existing code libraries to help this, so much the better. But otherwise, it's not easy going about building such a system so that it works as well as the multi-million dollar versions rolled out by Amazon and Facebook.
|
|
I use the facebook friend suggest application all the time. If Wiserearth ever has an embedded widget on facebook, developing an algorithm that could mill through keywords such as (permaculture, green business...etc.) in peoples profiles would be useful to find interesting folks to invite into the Wiserearth community. This seems far off in the future, but an algorithm to connect people by location, areas of interest or groups would be really useful.
|
|
We definitely need to explore this idea further. We already have a list of orgs, people, events, jobs etc who have been listed with the same AOFs that people list (in their profile page....although it's not very visible)...I wonder if we could improve this functionality so that it helps to provide a list of people, jobs, events, orgs in your local area - this would be a start in improving the connections between entities. |
|
Yep. Couldn't agree more with "to focus on connecting 'live entities' such a people, orgs and groups." Hope to share more thoughts on the questions later on.
|
and forums on a regular basis.