Ideas that have a high number of total votes, recent activity factor, karma of users voting (high karma users lower then new users), total comments (with karma users factor as before). This could get some long waiting highDEAS with a lot of conflict more exposure and push them to the front page or archive. Put it with the green "popular upcoming watched" tabbed bar.
Would be something like:
[totalvotes -1 (for full karma users)] + [recentactivityfactor(timeago 10 newest down to 1 oldest vote)+2(if karmaless last vote was up)] + [totalcomments(-1 for full karma users)] = Karma of highDEA