The sentiment score is designed to surface the ‘crowd-sourcing’ element of the Coffeemat Challenge. Or to put it a less jargonistic way, we gather a lot of votes for ideas and we want to share what the community think are the good ones and what they think are bad. The first thing to note is that a lot of votes are driven by participants simply telling their friends to vote for their ideas. These votes are completely ignored in the sentiment score.

Only votes for ideas that are randomly presented to the voter count towards the sentiment score. Any idea that is linked to directly will not improve it’s sentiment score. This works because typically voters vote many more times than one and so are exposed to more than one idea, only one of which they’ve been told to vote yes for. It is for this reason that the ideas are presented via a stream and we don’t make it too easy to access lists of ideas and so on.

As of today, the sentiment score is only revealed via participant emails, so if you want to find out what the best ideas are you’ll need to submit your own idea. But keep an eye out, we’ll be doing much more soon!