prediction markets

Prediction markets are only effective if a lot of people participate.  What are the best ways to encourage more traders and trading within internal company prediction markets?

The results of a prediction market are correlated to the size of its network; therefore companies should encourage participation in order to see positive results. Companies have some of the options below:

• provide time during the work day/week for employees to trade
• use non-monetary rewards like prizes, public recognition, or coupons to act as incentives for active and accurate traders
• incorporate the trading platform into software that employees use daily (email?) so that it becomes part of their daily routine to use it
• educate employees on the benefits and use of prediction markets to overcome resistance

I found it interesting to learn that DARPA studied the use of prediction markets to enhance US Intelligence, though the research was pulled after congressional criticism accused it of being "terrorism betting parlors." At that time (2003) lot of issues had yet to be resolved, such as determining a threshold for action or under which circumstances should the general public be allowed to trade. the use of prediction markets still isn't widely used, but I wonder if some agencies would be more receptive to its use today.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no4/using-prediction-markets-to-enhance-us-intelligence-capabilities.html

Community driven vs. traditional product development

What are the similarities and differences between a community-driven product development process and a traditional product development process within a firm?


In honor of the fact that I recently installed Office 2011 on my laptop, I made a Venn diagram.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn recently hit 100M users. If you were in charge at LinkedIn, what would be your strategic goals for the next several years? How would you achieve them?


In a few short years after it was founded, LinkedIn has become a profitable networking site for professionals. Its ability to monetize its platform is especially impressive considering the fact that LinkedIn is competing in a concentrated market where a couple of large social sites are excelling due to their large user bases supporting strong network effects. At the same time though, its current strategy may not sustainable over the long-term given the competitive environment.


In order to protect the integrity of its content and the value it provides to its users, LinkedIn should continue to control its software applications and emphasis on professional services. However, LinkedIn needs to find new methods of growing its user base to compensate for its narrow focus. In order to grow its network, LinkedIn should direct its resources to recruiting corporate customers and building tools that better connect employees within their organization and industry in which it competes. By signing on more corporations, LinkedIn will have access to a larger pool of individual users that will be more inclined to register, thereby growing the network. In order to make its services more appealing, LinkedIn could integrate conferencing services and data management. This development would be costly, though it provides added value and incentives for corporate users to contract with LinkedIn.

Wikipedia

How do Wikipedia’s processes for creating and modifying articles ever lead to high-quality results? In other words, since anyone can easily edit Wikipedia, how is it that good (and usually accurate) content emerges?

I like Wikipedia because it presents several different perspectives and I feel like I’m getting “all sides” of a story when I’m reading an article. It’s hard to report on a topic without having it become biased by personal views and past experiences, so by having several people write and edit a post, it seems more objective. And because everything is meant to be referenced, users can check the sources and judge for themselves the level of credibility. If I don't know anything about a subject, Wikipedia is a good first place to check because its database is so comprehensive, and generally, you can quickly find a more than adequate overview of almost any topic.

Even though it is open source and encourages public collaboration, you can't put just anything on Wikipedia. It has clearly outlined its guiding principles, and it has empowered its users to moderate discussions and enforce the core values. I work for a small marketing company (representing other small companies) so we try to come up with creative ways of increasing our web relevance without spending a lot of money. At one point, we tried to post Wikipedia pages for our clients and their technologies, but almost immediately they'd be rejected unless we could reference published articles on the topic.

I found an interesting article/interview on the culture of Wikipedia. Joseph Reagle, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, has written a book about Wikipedia and its collaborative climate. In the article, Reagle is interviewed about Wikipedia's processes, values, and bureaucracy.  The article, and the comments below it, echo a lot of what is said in the case, but from a more recent perspective.

http://opensource.com/business/10/9/inside-culture-wikipedia-qa-author-good-faith-collaboration