Emotional Tracking System

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This page is a Request for Enhancement. It is a draft. You are encouraged to find support for it, etc.
After the enhancement has been clearly articulated, and all affected portions of the website have been identified, you may try to persuade a developer to implement it. After implementation it will be deployed somewhere, but not necessarily to the main website.

The Basic Idea consists of two large interconnected features: An emotional tracking system and a friend match-making system that could:

  • Help people find friends in similar situations in life, to make travels more meaningful, while making life easier by enticing deeper and more meaningful personal open hearted dialogue.
  • It would have features to instigate intimacy, by tracking user's emotional evolution overtime and their behavior.

Discuss this idea in the Brainstorm group

Contents

Technical Draft

ETS Technical Draft

Premises

  • we need each other to find ourselves
  • it takes too long to find friends that are on the same path in life and that makes us all anxious and untruthfully independent.
  • It is all about shared learning. Once we learn about ourselves, sharing it is so important . It is the very essence of intercultural understanding. What if we could have a system to find matches that can help us find our emotional matches that way?
  • the system wants to encourage emotional inclusion.


The step by step process:

  1. A special area of the site, called "Self Explorer" or "SelfSurfing", only enabled for verified, or vouched users with friends on the network.
  2. An explanation of the whole idea and how it can make the tourism of intimacy better. The explanation is shown via the user's prefered media: sound, video, animation, essay or personally by an ambassador. This explanation gives the basic definitions of the systems concepts, benefits and so on.
  3. A series of random questions, written by users and by site coordinators. These questions would be like "how would you feel about hosting a gay couple?" what is drinking too much for you? answers would be multiple choice. We answer all these questions and our answers are compared and matched with other people's answers and averages and so on.
  4. User is showed a series of forms to fill out, asking basic questions like: "What is love to you?" "How do you see a child?"or "How do you see life's emotions and intellect? etc etc. The idea here is to get the current image that the person has about her/himself.
  5. User is showed all the new features that are enabled on the site that tracks their emotional evolution overtime. They are able to turn on and off the features at anytime. The idea is to invite users to be very honest with their emotions in every step of their communication in couchsurfing.com, therefore have a more clear path toward personal growth. The more honest a user is in their communication, the better chances you have to find true friends (matches) out there and help the world be better. It enables us to accept everyone as equals, when we learn about ourselves.
  6. System creates a series of matches based on all of the above, that finds people on the probable similar path in life.
  7. All changes are tracked, graphed and shown to user at any time. User may make all of it public, or only share it with their strongest friends links. Changes overtime are clearly shown graphically using some sort of graphical system, maybe using the example of WeFeelFine
  8. User is given a few options to meet possible matches, like travel plans, chat, hangout in real person, go to a weekend adventure, or whatever.

Some features

  • Emotional dropdown box. Users have the option of having a dropdown box with 20 or so basic emotions (anger, love, sorrow, doubt, surprise, amusement, sadness, etc) Everytime a user changes that, when typing an email, or a writing a blog, or anytime the user is online and feels a change in emotion, that change is tracked.
  • Self awareness tracker: there are words that describe and actions that a person takes that suggests levels of self awareness. The system would help find out what those words and actions are, compare them to others and give out a number that a user can work towards.
  • Friendship intimacy level tracker: Based on the emotional evolution history of a person, the system would create a number that would suggest their intimacy level from 1 to 100 or whatever. At worse, it would instigate the friends to ask each other, why don't we become better friends? System may suggest what kinds of questions to ask to each other to make the friendship more intimate.
  • Authenticity tracker: How much more honest is the person being overtime?
  • Philosophical tracker and match maker : system would specifically make matches and track 2 people or a group of people philosophical differences, after answering a series of questions, and matching that with their emotional state.
  • Forum answer relevance. A forum rank system similar to slashdot's forum. This is a system that rates relevance in forum answers. Users choose if what they read was relevant to them and rate that from 1 to 10. The only difference is that their emotional state of mind is also take into account to determined what is best for each user at a similar emotional state. People may answer something in a forum differently when emotional involved or are sad or happy or whatever.

Data that could be used in the system

  • profile data, overtime changes in profiles, number of friends, quality of friendships, etc.
  • blogging
  • group access and group posts
  • keywords
  • travel patterns and tastes, meetings
  • search results
  • emotional dropdown box changes
  • chat logs
  • image tagging (photo and keyword matching)
  • volunteer work in CS.

Conclusion

It is travel match making and the tourism of intimacy combined in a system that is created and refined by the users. Advantages are so many, just on instigating the truth, creating ambassadors of truth in a sense. It can be used even for people interested in the couchsurfing university system, as a training tool.

Wouldn't be amazing to have people travel together and make friendships with people that have a higher possibility to be at a similar path in life? We would go deeper in people´s minds, and we could help each other find other paths if we feel that we are wrong or whatever.


Financial Reward

Can you see the possible financial reward of such a system? Wouldn´t advertising be more valuable, since we could actually advertise on what a person is feeling at the time?

Interested developers

  • Anu
  • TGoorden
  • Chris Burley - emorigal

Contact

Interesting Links

related articles

Practical ideas

  • Extracting "tags" from existing material, like interests, music, movies, books, countries travelled / lived in etc. To a lesser extend "types of people I enjoy" and "teach, learn, share" could be used as well.
  • Possible doing some kind of textual mining analysis on the other more freeform textfields in order to include them in the tracking calculations
  • Creating Tag clouds, like this example (Technorati)
  • Matching profiles based on tags. A working example can be found at LibraryThing, where many cloud examples are available.
  • Visualization of degrees of separation through friends and references, possibly with an animated floating graph? (Maybe we'll start to see clusters and such)
  • Indicating or searching for people with overlapping groups.
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