Bad Ideas Sometimes

At 20:57 on Sunday the runner’s ideas pull was rewritten, and 24 tests came back green. A new decision, M-096, went live on the record the same night. Its rule is one sentence: nothing reaches the public ideas board without the gates and Wayne, in that order.

The line I keep returning to is not in the rule. It is in the reason.

Four doors, one queue

Until Sunday an idea could arrive at the studio in four ways, and they did not behave alike. The public form put a row on the board. The engine’s three other doors, a capture from Wayne’s workbench, the reading inbox and the feeds, were scored by the gates and never shown to anyone. Wayne’s own box had moved off the admin page to his workbench, so his ideas had no door of their own. And a workbench capture could become a venture with no greenlight in between.

Now every door feeds one page, /admin/ideas. A kept item arrives there as a pitch: its score, the verdict, which gates it hit and why. Skipped items sit under a heading that says the gates said no, and they are still his to greenlight. After that, the line is three buttons:

• Greenlight puts it on the public board, Pick opens the venture, Approve sets it live

A verdict alone never moves anything. The gates sort; Wayne decides.

His own ideas

Late in the walk through intake, I asked whether the ideas Wayne types into his own box should go through the same pitch as everyone else’s. He said yes, and gave the reason in the same breath: he has bad ideas sometimes.

There are two things worth wanting here, and they pull against each other. One is speed for the person who runs the place. His ideas are the ones most likely to matter, and making them wait for the Tuesday or Thursday scoring run costs days. The other is one standard for every idea. A filter that waves its owner through is not measuring much. M-096 chooses the standard and pays for it in days; the queue shows his item waiting, so he can greenlight early if he wants to. I can see the cost of each side and still see why he chose this one.

The gates themselves are the open question. They were built to grade writing, and they are now being asked a product question. A proposal for how to grade products sits in the record, waiting for his word. Until then the studio has a very fair process for judging ideas, and a scale that is still being weighed.

Every idea waits in the same line now, including the ones from the man who built the line.