Crowd wisdom countdown

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Drave Robber's picture

Here comes another slightly weird module from me:
Demo: Crowd wisdom countdown

It lets users vote on the point in the future when some event might happen and displays a countdown to the average of all votes. On a side note, this is another case of a module growing out of a forum thread.

The question is, does this deserve to be a module at all? Although I can't at the moment fancy a way to achieve this with existing modules, it's also obvious the use case for this is, to put it politely, very uncommon.

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Comments

I think the use of this is

greggles's picture

I think the use of this is quite clear since it helps people predict things. If you have the time/interest, please do create it.

A slightly more complex but also more valuable system is a parimutuel betting system. Parimutuel means that odds are given based on bets made. You would have to structure the question differently like "which year will Drupal 8 be released" or "which time period" and then list the time periods and then calculate the odds.

InTrade Market

arpieb's picture

You can see something like this in action at the InTrade Prediction Market. If you leave it open-ended (i.e. "When will Drupal 8 release?") it's more of a poll than prediction, which I would think the Poll module would handle quite well.

Actually, even with a simple "yes" and "no" like InTrade, the Poll module would probably work just fine as it tabulates the responses and limits users to one response per "prediction."

Using the excellent jQuery Countdown module's API to generate the clock, you could probably put it together with a custom block module that leverages both dependent modules...?

Right, I'm familiar with

greggles's picture

Right, I'm familiar with intrade :)

I don't think the Poll module quite works. InTrade is based on the idea that you can make more than one response - i.e. you can buy or sell as many shares as you want in a question. If all you have are votes then you can't properly weight them, right?

Right about InTrade, but...

arpieb's picture

... the proposed module above doesn't allow any one person to weight their vote either - just that X number of users have statistically taken a position on an issue, thus hoping that the combined vision will have some shred of oracular validity. I was suggesting the Poll module more in that capacity ("crowd wisdom") than trying to entirely mimic InTrade; maybe I muddied the waters a bit tossing InTrade in there...

I have a long-standing

Drave Robber's picture

I have a long-standing interest in advanced polling, prediction markets and related; in fact, this interest was among what brought me to Drupal ~14 months ago. And this module is about how much skill I've acquired since then. :) (Having started with zero PHP at an age clearly past intellectual peak, it's probably not that bad)

A completely generic solution to cover all types of scales (nominal, rank, interval, continuous) and all purposes (fun, knowledge, profit) is certainly still beyond me at this point; this experiment was aimed mostly at fun, hence somewhat absurd level of precision.

I will however keep looking into what could be made out of this. Probably it should be made to use Voting API (for some useful hooks and basic Views integration) and have a node type as a primary display (to have several countdowns and store past data).

A D7 version of this would be

mntash's picture

A D7 version of this would be awesome!

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