I have been using StickK for the past few weeks for certain types of goals. The reason behind this is that StickK allows you to use a friend as a referee for your goal, who reports success or failure to meet your goal for each reporting period (i.e. day, week, etc). In other words, it adds an extra layer of accountability and weaselproofing, since you have to provide your referee with evidence of your progress in order for them to report success.
Your StickK goal referee is a friend in contrast to your “Boss”, who is a complete stranger. As far as I am concerned, the fact that I get to share my thoughts, goals, and progress with a friend, while I am accountable to them at the same time, is much more valuable and meaningful than sharing those things with a stranger. Also, I believe that the “embarrassment” felt when you fail to meet your goal and you have to explain to your friend the reason behind this failure, is much greater compared to the one you feel when you have to explain the failure to your “Boss”.
You get to decide the recipient of the charge that you have to pay when you do not meet your StickK goal for a reporting period (i.e. day, week, etc). It can be a charity, an anti-charity, a friend, StickK, or even a pledgeless goal. I have set up my referee as the recipient, after agreeing with him that he would not return me the money under any circumstances.
The pledge is static and predetermined by you.
When you stickK to a goal you don’t get to beemind it!!!
The ideal solution for me would be a Beeminder integration with StickK. In this way, I would set up a pledgeless StickK goal that I would then beemind, gaining the pros of both services. However, since this might be a bit hard to do, I thought of a workaround that sounds much easier:
What if I set a Beeminder goal that restricts me from adding data to it, and only allows a referee of my selection to do so (by accepting emails only from my referee’s email address for example)?
Starting with the title question, the answer is yes, via the email bot, but if you want only the friend to be able to add data and not you, then I’m not seeing a way to do that, other than for the friend to call you out if you do it. More on that below.
Anguished wail! Unless you’re referring to the huge cost of having to wait so long to get off BaaS’s wait list? As I keep telling them, Boss as a Service is waaaay too cheap. I mean, business-wise it is. If from your perspective as a user it’s too expensive then I contend that you’re not in the market for a human service like that. Which I guess is your point. You’re aiming to set up something similar with friends, which is awesome.
(In my experience it’s very hard to do this kind of thing sustainably with friends because people’s interest and attention wanes and the arrangement peters out. But don’t let that discourage you; I’m excited to be proven wrong! And do keep us posted!)
No? Making a StickK contract based on a Beeminder goal might make a ton of sense. Even without any integration or enforcement, you could just create the Beeminder goal and then create the StickK contract linking to it, which would prompt your referee to double-check the data you entered in Beeminder, or let the referee add it for you and they can also call you out if you add any data yourself or otherwise tamper with the graph.
PS: I should also mention our supporters feature, inferior as it is to StickK’s referee feature.
From this then I presume that integrating a Boss as a Service goal with Beeminder does not restrict you from adding data to the goal? I assumed that only your “Boss” would be allowed to add data to it.
This is exactly the reason why I have set up my referee as the recipient of the charge. So that he has an incentive to report my success or failure!!
I believe @manasvinik / BaaS has a solution for this that they plan to blog about at some point. Stay tuned! Or ask your “boss” in the meantime how to make your BaaS-fed Beeminder goal nice and weaselproof.
Set up a recipe that trigger on new data from the goal
Connect it to Beeminder charge
Set up appropriate filters to not charge you if your friend sent the data.
Then it depends how bullet-proof the thing has to be.
They could provide a password in the data entry comment, or list of passwords, possibly calculate a hash of the passwords, so you can’t see them. It’s all typescript, so you have options. But it’s a bit convoluted.
(My favourite so far is a hash-table of value: hash(comment), where a specific value has to accompany a specific password that you can’t read to not trigger a charge. Your friend then has a list of values and passwords they can send. Pair it with the auto-ratchet so that the friend can send a value of 32 and it doesn’t impact the goal.)
But the easiest would probably be to use IFTTT to connect Beeminder to Email and send an email to your friend, every time data is added. Ya know, in case you cheat they will know.
As I keep telling them, Boss as a Service is waaaay too cheap. I mean, business-wise it is. If from your perspective as a user it’s too expensive then I contend that you’re not in the market for a human service like that. Which I guess is your point. You’re aiming to set up something similar with friends, which is awesome.