That is a great link Michael! The Judgement test was highly entertaining. I definitely thought I'd do better. LOL.
Kim, there are a couple videos that explain pairwise on the allourideas website, but let me address one thing in particular. You mentioned getting tired of the process. That is exactly one of the reason that pairwise was created. When social scientist are trying to gather information through surveys they often have to deal with incomplete surveys. Typically people will agree to do the survey but get tired, or just stop caring enough to finish, or get interrupted. This information typically has to be thrown away because it doesn't conform to the statistics being used to correlate the information.
So pairwise uses a method and statistics to gather information from people that want to give more info that typical and those that give just a little.
Also, upvoting on the forum may be simpler but it doesn't allow you to compare the votes in any meaningful way. You can see a difference in the number of votes but that difference is meaningless.
Here is an example: Suppose there are ten ideas on the forum thread and over the course of a week one idea is clearly preferred and has more votes; lets say it has 100 votes. Then a new idea is added to the list that is very popular and starts to get a lot of votes. And after two weeks this idea has 100 votes and the previous best idea has 150 votes. Which idea is actually preferred? Well, you have no way of knowing. So the poll is meaningless. Except as a way to count votes over time.
I understand that the page loading can be an issue. Unfortunately a forum is definitely going to be able to present more information an any given time.
