On March 2, 2011, the co-founders of She Chooses sent an email to 100 women with this introduction:
We invite you to join She Chooses(TM), the social network for women! You are one of 100 women the co-founders of She Chooses are privately and individually inviting by email to join She Chooses before we release it to the public.
If you haven’t heard yet, She Chooses is the social network that adds a decision-making element to social sharing. She Chooses is for women who want to feel deeply, think seriously, and communicate meaningfully with each other. The web site is up! The mobile app is in the works!
We are so grateful to these 100 first members of She Chooses for helping us with the site.
Ideally, a site's use is intuitive. She Chooses has novel and unique features that we think give it incomparable value for women to use for themselves, and to increase the meaningfulness of their participation in a social network. Like with all new things, some of the features take a little practice.
She Chooses is like other social networks in that members post updates. She Chooses is different in that it offers an algorithm-based method for considering choices: "Feel. Think. Choose." (Here's the essence of Feel. Think. Choose. explained on our blog and there are more details on How She Chooses Works and the She Chooses Users' Guide.)
When members share choices from Feel. Think. Choose., other members who appreciate those choices can give them an "Appreciation Rating."
Here's more on the Appreciation Rating from How She Chooses Works.
When a user sees the list of choices made by other women, she may ask, "I don't know these women. How reliable are their choices?" Other users help a woman know.
When a user views an update with a choice made by another user and finds that user's choice particularly insightful, she can appreciate the user by giving her an Appreciation Rating. A user's overall Appreciation Rating can be viewed on her profile page. Appreciation Ratings are given to users who communicate in their updates how they feel deeply, think seriously, and make meaningful choices based on awareness of their feelings and thoughts.
Since She Chooses is algorithm-based, to display results, we chose a rating scale that people are familiar with and use the standard "agree/disagree" 5-point scale with regard to this statement: "I appreciate this user and her choices." To the degree a member appreciates a user and her choice, she selects from "Strongly agree," which gives the user a score of 5, to "Strongly disagree," which gives her a score of 1.
A member's overall Appreciation Rating appears on her page like this: “On average, other users have appreciated this user and the ability of her choices to address their feelings and needs at 4.00 on a scale of 1 to 5.”
So, simply put, here's what an Appreciation Rating is:
- a way for a She Chooses member to express appreciation, regard and praise for another member and the wisdom, insight or value of her choices.
- a way for members to give and receive credit and support for deliberate consideration of choices.
- an overall way to tell the difference between a genuine member of She Chooses and a casual user. The algorithm lists choices made by members who actively use Feel. Think. Choose. and who are actively appreciated members above those who are rarely active or have recieved low Appreciation Ratings.
- a way for members, when they are considering a choice, to see many choices made by many members in an order determined by the members themselves.
And here's what an Appreciation Rating is not:
- a measure of the value of a member's updates. Appreciation Ratings only result from members' uses of Feel. Think. Choose. and the rating is overall, not choice-by-choice or update-by-update.
- a measure of the value of a member's choice. A member makes her own choice. Some choices will work for her and not for others. Ultimately, she chooses. That's the point.
- a measure of the value of a member.
The origin of She Chooses was an idea in a human heart and a human mind based on human experience. But She Chooses is software. It's never going to appreciate any one member, or all the members, in the whole and beautiful way we can appreciate each other human-to-human.
Comments