Introducing the San Diego Burger Mob

On Monday, I decided I wanted to survey San Diego’s best burgers throughout the year. I came up with a plan to visit one burger place each month. I didn’t have any plans to blog about it or do anything more elaborate. San Diego has a few famous burger places – e.g. Rocky’s and Hodad’s – but I needed to find 12 places, so I tweeted:

What’s the best burger in San Diego? Chains don’t count. Add your favorite to this list: docs.google.com/document/d/1I1…

— Jed Sundwall (@jedsundwall) January 10, 2012

The response was fantastic. It’s really fun to watch a Google Doc come alive after a tweet. It was clear people wanted to do this with me and now I find myself wanting to do something ridiculously elaborate. I talked to Lindsay, Tony, and Chris about it and we decided to create The San Diego Burger Mob.

Here’s the plan:

1. Get the list down to 12 places by eliminating any place with more than three locations, any burgers that cost more than $14 (abitrary!), and making a call about which places simply shouldn’t be in the running (update: this has been done)
2. Assign each place a month
3. Tell everyone
4. Everyone eats burgers
5. ?????
6. Profit!

My hope is that step 5 will include having everyone rate the burgers by using an instant runoff voting system (aka the alternative vote) that I plan to create as my Code Year project. We’ll create a ballot at the end of the year that will allow everyone to rank their favorite burgers.

Of course, who’s going to remember a burger they ate 11 months ago? Well, you can always go back and revisit places (12 burgers of Christmas anyone? [← don’t do this, it’s a terrible idea]). I also recommend that everyone write their own reviews of burgers as they go along, so they have something to help them fill out their ballot at the end of the year. Ernesto Ramirez even came up with a spreadsheet to keep track of reviews.

Also, step 6 isn’t profit for me or the mob. It’s profit for the maker of San Diego’s best burger. My goal here is that I can use my flimsy understanding of the internet and political science to discover and promote greatness – burger greatness.

How to sign up

Just join this Google group. Your responsibilities as a member of the mob will be to eat 12 burgers throughout the year and fill out a ballot at the end of the year. That’s it. I’d like to get as many people as possible in the mob, so I’m not going to try to get everyone to meet for burgers at the same time.