Surveys/polls as the new alternative to camping

So a lot of people ask how to make moneY in SL. A lot of students want to take suveys of residents. I say we combine the two and have a sim set aside where you can take a survey and get some L$. Newbs get some cash. Better retention. Students get their grade. It's a win all around.

Good idea huh?

Many academic surveys or test labs do, in fact, provide cash for participation, or something similar, so it's not a far-out idea by any means. I had a friend who offered a randomly-drawn prize of, I think, C$ 50 to participants in an online academic survey she conducted.

Of course, it would be more difficult for students to set up surveys this way. But that actually might be an advantage: it would discourage the lazy students who are never in-world from simply posting something as a substitute for real research.

Umm.. they already had something like that, Hippy-pay, it was called, I think.

Apparently, people got hit with viruses, keyloggers, didn't get paid and all that jazz.

Edit: LL would have to approve them! That might cut down on the Hippy-pay issues!

Good Idea! LL should help this along. It would cater to Academic Institutions! The very thing LL wants to do. LL wins as well! Pesky students have to actually sacrifice some hard earned parent's cash too. We win!

I too have heard of a University that was paying a thousand L$ for each survey.

You can run into ethical issues and questions about the validity of your data when you are paying your research subjects an amount that is disproportionate to the time involved or any associated costs of participation, or if it may unduly influence a disregard for the risks of participation. It can get astoundingly complicated depending on the type of research you are conducting, although I suspect most of the undergrad projects don't go through an official ethical review.

LL would need to have an approval process (which includes RL information and school information) and maybe a small fee to host the survey link on the island and a deposit to encourage payout. The deposit should be the amount that the survey has allotted for paying to questionees. If the researcher fails to pay out, the deposit would be forfeit and would instead be paid to the questionees. The researcher would then no longer be allowed to give surveys on the island. The deposit could be waived if the researcher is a part of a university that is already in SL.

LL could then create a group that is open enrollment that would allow interested residents keep up to date in world about new surveys. They could also create a section of the flogorums for it, so those that don't have the group space can track it.

This would then give LL the ability to remove those that pester the crap out of us in the forum.

LL could also do something similar for market research firms, but on a separate island.

That would make for a nice case of "everyone wins."

There is a group in-world that will set up a survey, publish the info to the group members, and pay the group members a small stipend for taking the survey.

I ended up dropping the group for lack of space, so I don't know how active they still are. But they were not hippie-pay, and they were (as far as I could tell) legit. At least, I didn't get any spam or malware that I'm aware of, and we did get paid.

Dangit, I'm drawing a complete blank on the name of the group. Their headquarters were in Tully Low, IIRC. I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

EDIT - First Opinions Panel. Thank goodness for saving old emails. (They do/did require an email address, though I'd imagine it would be simple enough to open a free one in your avatar's name for that purpose. Was never a lot of lindens, just L$100 or L$250 here and there - but they'd be a great resource for these students with projects. If they're still around. [The group, that is. Clearly the students are.])