Hurray! We finally filed the patent on Community Equity and I can disclose more details….

Overview

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in, for example:

• Adding or updating contributions (wikis,forums, attachments)
• Rating, commenting
• Tagging
• Downloading and reusing content
• Social connections
• Search queries

Equity Model

The systems will calculate the following equity values:

• Information Equity (IQ)
• Personal Equity (PEQ)

Information Equity (IQ)

The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information. Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.

The activities that the IQ captures includes:

* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information
* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)
* How many times this information was reused by an individual
* User feedback (ratings, comments)

How do we know that a document has been reused?
We developed a web service called “Content extraction and metadata store,” which writes a tag in an OpenOffice document. This tag describes the source community of the document (for example, Project xx). If a user is downloading this document and stores it in another community, we write a parent tag into the OpenOffice document, which describes the destination community. By analyzing the tags we know that a document has been reused. In addition, we can build a dynamic cloning reference of related documents.

Personal Equity (PEQ)
The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.

Here is the calculation:

PEQ = CQ + PQ + SQ + RQ + OE

Contribution Equity (CQ)
The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his or her role or roles in a company.
The CQ tracks the total contribution of wiki entries, blog posts, attachments such as documents, podcasts, videos, software, and how this information is useful to the community (IQ).
Per contribution we calculate an equity value based on downloads, ratings and reuse by the community.

Participation Equity (PQ)
The Participation Equity calculates a value for the active participation of a person. We use the feedback activities a person has provided to other community contributions like

* Ratings provided
* Comments provided
* Tag or Tags provided
* Reuse of content

Skills Equity (SQ)
The Skills Equity shows the skills of a person based on his or her contribution
Details will be disclosed later.

Reputation Equity (RQ)
The Reputation Equity (RQ) is a combination of contribution, participation and role equity.
Details will be disclosed later …