Tutoring Website

Kingdom Animalia, 'cause boobies, we got em.

Sometime I have great ideas for websites, my last one was Congressman Drinking Bird, a website where you can see just how well your congresspersons match you on the issues by pitting them up against a randomly voting drinking bird. My latest one is a tutoring website. I don't have a catchy name for it, but I do have some great ideas.

The genesis of the idea was for an official website for clients to find tutors. Furthermore, if the tutor set it up to work this way, they could auction off their sessions to the highest bidder. This would work well for a tutor who worked out of a public area, like a library. It could also just work as a place for a tutor to post their schedule and their subjects so that clients can find someone who works for them. Another way to connect clients and tutors would be that if a client couldn't find someone to suit their needs and schedule, they could post a bounty for tutors to find. The last way I can imagine would be to hold a webcam tutoring session.

The site would have a rating system, so that people would know if a tutor was bad. Furthermore, the tutors would also (secretly) rate the students to know if the student was trouble or not. They could also post comments about the student's problem areas and progress that would be visible by the other tutors. 

As with anything like this, there are issues. Warnings would have to be posted and reminded about regarding safety, such as meeting in public places or at your own residence and having adult supervision.

There is the issue of monetization. Ads are a definite way to monetize. Centralized tutoring services (such as Sylvan) could advertise on the site. Textbook/ebook sales are another definite way to generate revenue. The other way would be to have payment be handled by the website and have a commission for each session plus maybe a monthly fee for the tutors (only if they book a session that month, to remove the barrier to entry). 

The risk with handling the money is that now the site becomes responsible for it. If the tutor doesn't show up, they should be paid. If the student doesn't show up (without canceling ahead of time) then the tutor should still be paid. A system would have to be put into place to verify that the tutoring session happened/didn't happen and why. My best idea would be to have an email be sent to the tutor that, when opened, would have a link to the site. Once there, the student or parent would have to enter a special code/password to verify their attendance. I still don't have the logistics of it worked out so that it's foolproof. Another is to have some sort of geolocation tied to IP addresses or maybe a smartphone app tied to the GPS to verify locations. It's rough idea.

Congressman Drinking Bird

So I came up with this idea for a website, I call it CongressmanDrinkingBird.com, although the name is subject to change. The idea is that the website asks each visitor what state they are from, whether they identify as Republican or Democrat, and then asks polls their opinion on 10 or so topics that came before Congress, yea or nay. Then, Congressman Drinking Bird casts his votes on the topics by selecting at random, 50-50. Then, it will show how you, Congressman Drinking Bird, and the congressmen (and women) from your state voted. This would allow you to gauge how accurately your representatives are representing your interests.

Other polling topics are possible, such as gender. However, it is good to keep in mind that people don't like to spend much time answering stupid questions about themselves and can also find those questions intrusive and may be turned off by them. So it's good to keep the survey small, unobtrusive, but still giving you good information about the visitors.

Congressman Drinking Bird acts as a gauge of how good your representative is, because at 50% randomness, he should agree with you 5 out of 10 times. If your representative does worse than that, then their interests are clearly opposed to yours. So theoretically, Congressman Drinking Bird can win, and possibly represent you better than your congressman.

The site would keep statistics on how people voted on issues, on how well the congressmen represent their people, keep track of each congressman's win percentage against Congressman DB, and keep track on CDB's overall win percentage. The site would also provide a list, ranking each congressman by the average number of times they agree with a visitor from their state.

Monetization
I have come up with a few monetization schemes for the site.

1. Congressmen can pay to have a link to their website from the results page. As in, when the site shows how your opinions compare with your congressman and CDB, their would be a link (possibly even a banner) next to your result that would point the user toward your page.

2. Groups can pay to have access to portions of the polling data.

3. People who are running for office can take a full survey of issues, and then when someone from that state comes to the site, it can show just how the candidates rate on the issues versus the other candidates/incumbents. Naturally, this service would cost money.

EDIT: It could also have a cute/funny animation with a caption that says "Congressman Drinking Bird is carefully weighing the issues."  Perhaps some webcomic artists could be troubled to add their look/skills to the design.