Earlier tonight I had a fleeting thought about crowdsourcing my decision-making via twitter. Several people chimed in pretty quickly, and before I knew it, a concrete idea was formed.

An experiment was born. One in which I would post my life's control-flow logic on twitter and let people make my decisions. The trial run resulted in a very tasty bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. Shortly after it was decided I would make a blog post rather than play video games. Simple stuff, but, it was fun and interesting to do.

Almost right away I discovered the ways in which people will branch the decision further, and that the answers aren't binary. The bacon suggestion came from what was essentially intended to be a yes/no question. On the blog/video game question, people not only chose blogging, but they suggested topics. I had to do quick math to determine if any topic got a majority before I followed through on the decision made for me.

Like I said, it was fun.

I've decided I'm going to keep the experiment up for a little while. I created a new twitter account (@decideforscott) that you can follow if you want to join in and choose my adventure for me.

The rules are simple:

• I pose a question, you answer it with an @reply
• After a reasonable time has passed (variant on the urgency of the decision) I will take the most popular response and act on it. This means that maybe after 10 minutes I'm adding up votes, or, maybe the first response is the one I go with in the interest of time.
• I will post the results of both the poll, and my subsequent action.

Why am I doing this? I dunno. It's a lark mostly. A bit of an experiment. Maybe a little bit of narcissism, and probably at least a touch of trying to open my mind as I prepare to make some major changes in my life (more on that soon). But mostly, it was a wacky idea that I decided to follow for a little while. Thanks for playing along.

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