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Ron Evans
The Scale of Trust
Posted by Oct 12, 2010
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Ron Evans
I'm really enjoying the blog salon discussion by so many smart folks here on ARTSBlog. Technology in the Arts' David Dombrosky and I both decided to pick up the banner of discussing citizen reviewers and trusting online commentary. In his recent post, he talks about the need to educate citizen reviewers so they know how to write an intelligent review. And in my recent post, I talk about training people to trust what people are reviewing right now.
I thought this was a cool way to attack the problem, and people seemed to dig the perspectives via the comments they left. So I emailed David and asked is he wanted to join my on Skype and talk about these two ways of attacking the problem on a deeper level. You can listen in on the recorded convo below:
Ian David Moss (fellow ARTSBlog writer) also chimed in with some thoughts on how he and his friend Daniel Reid had considered some of these issues when it comes to some of the big “vote for your arts group to get a grant” challenges that are happening all over the place. Based on these conversations, I decided to take a crack at a simple rating system, let's call the “scale of trustiness” (or SOT -- let's bring the great word SOT back from its original meaning!) that you can store in your head when you're reading an online review for an arts event. You won't need to remember any number of points or anything -- it's enough that you just consider a particular review on the SOT scale, and if you're weighing two shows to go to, perhaps each review's SOT score can help you decide what to attend.
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