It’s sad – but this great idea – a collaborative iPhone pricing spreadsheet for New Zealand – has completely failed. It’s a mess, there are people deleting things and Telco or device religion rather than science seems to be driving behaviour.
I don’t care how much Vodafone’s rates are – their network simply isn’t as good as Telecom’s XT network for the 3G radio frequencies used by the iPhone.
Lance Wiggs 
Such a shame! It was for the greater good and unfortunately some people couldn’t be neutral and/or not be trolls.
Was a fun experiment though.
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I feel bad for the people who worked hard on the chart.
Some humans can be *insert uncharitable vulgar word* sometimes.
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Hey Lance. All credit for Su Yin for trying to get this happening and bad karma to those who screwed it around… that said it’s not a criticism of the tools, just of the way the tools were deployed. Publicly viewing but controlled editing of a cloud doc would have been fine…..
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This is what happens when there isn’t accountability. I was afraid that when I opened up Barcamp Auckland’s schedule for anyone to edit then a similar thing would happen. However it turns out that people felt accountable for their actions for two reasons:
a) Screwing things up would negatively influence their own experience at Barcamp
b) Chances were people would know them personally and therefor they felt a social responsibility to respect the schedule.
In this situation; by screwing this up, I’m not directly ruining my own experience and chances are I don’t know anyone else accessing this personally so I don’t have the same sense of social responsibility.
User generated content/User moderation; not always the best idea.
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Quick response, Lance – but I don’t think that spreadsheet is dead yet.
I think the idiots will disappear – and it seems they have started to already.
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Thanks Ben. It was mainly for my own use to work out if I could afford an iPhone and to see if Telecom are tricking me. Then I thought, hey … other people might find this useful and/or see a flaw in my pricing input.
Good point, Ludwig! I guess I had too much faith in the accountability of people.
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are you going to publish an unadulterated version?
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The dataset is actually getting good now that I have set up permissions.
I have saved a few copies but no plans to do anything as such.
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Ah, Lance, I see at last you’ve seen the light then… If the price is the same, move to a provider that actually gives you service compatible with the hardware you have.
As for the spreadsheet, great idea. But it took me five seconds of seeing the changes to just go away.
Reality is people complain about too much moderation – but the Internet is an old west area with lots of trolls around.
Don’t feed the trolls.
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too many trolls and not enought macros IMO. :D
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Lance,
Someone needs to build a telecommunications rates comparison site…
cheers
Bernard
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