February 2012
1 post
first paper
We’ve just posted our first paper about the research behind allourideas.org. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Wiki surveys: Open and quantifiable social data collection
Matthew J. Salganik and Karen E. C. Levy
Abstract: Research about attitudes and opinions is central to social science and relies on two common methodological approaches: surveys and interviews. While surveys enable...
January 2012
1 post
Wikipedia Banner Challenge: Results
Congratulations to Wikipedia for a successful fundraiser. They raised 20 million dollars with donations from more than one million people. Now that the fundraiser is complete, we have archived the Wikipedia Banner Challenge; you can still vote and upload new banners, but those contributions will not be recorded. Below, I’ll present some analysis of the data and provide links to...
December 2011
3 posts
Wikipedia Banner Challenge
As you can tell from the banners appearing all over Wikipedia, their fundraiser is in full swing. Despite Wikipedia’s importance as a global resource, only about one-in-a-thousand Wikipedia readers donate. One way to improve that would be better banners, and that’s why we are launching the Wikipedia Banner Challenge, a website to collect and prioritize banner ideas for Wikipedia. You ...
Governor Genro tops President Obama on Citizen...
Something neat is happening in Porto Alegre, Brazil today. Governor Tarso Genro, of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is meeting with some of his constituents. Of course, that’s pretty normal; governors meet with constituents all the time. What is neat is how those constituents were selected. They are not the ones with the most money or influence, they are the ones with the best ideas.
...
great news: another grant from Google
Our project has just been awarded another Google Faculty Research Award. This grant will allow us to continue our research and keep improving allourideas.org. Thank you Google.
November 2011
2 posts
new code patch from the community
Thank you to Lucas D’Avila from Brazil for submitting an improvement to our code-base. Here are the details of the patch.
All Our Ideas is an open source project, and we welcome contributions from everyone in our community. [The image of Tux the Linux penguin is from Wikimedia Commons.]
server improvements
We took the site down today for about an hour for some server improvements. Everything went as planned, and we are now running Passenger 3. This should lead to improved performance, especially when we have multiple concurrent sessions.
Thank you to the good folks at Phusion who released Passenger 3 open-source.
October 2011
2 posts
occupy wall street
Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have started using allourideas.org to help articulate goals. You can:
Participate
Read more on the Digital Democracy blog
Follow @OccupyVotes on twitter
Help them collect even more information by embedding a widget in your website or blog. Here’s the embed code:
Here’s more about how to customize the widget.
The Junior League and all our ideas
The Association of Junior Leagues International Inc. is a non-profit that improves communities through volunteer projects and builds the leadership skills of its 155,000 members. To provide additional training opportunities to members, the Junior League recently started a Wednesday Webinar series, and the first challenge for Becki Fleischer, the leader of the series, was to decide on speakers. ...
September 2011
1 post
allourideas in hebrew
I am happy to announce that the voter-facing portions of the site have now been translated into Hebrew. Thank you to the volunteer translator Uri Shwed.
All Our Ideas is now available in seven languages other than English thanks to the great work of volunteers. If you would like to help translate the site into another language, please send me an email.
August 2011
2 posts
contribute to all our ideas
All Our Ideas is an open-source project. That means that you can contribute to the code base to help the project grow. We’ve already had volunteer translators who have internationalized the site, but now we are asking for contributions from coders too. Here’s a list of open coding tasks that you can do. Have other ideas for improving the project? If so, let us know.
The photo...
maps
Above is a map of the 2.5 million votes that we have received so far at allourideas.org. How does this map compare to other maps like the luminosity of the world at night, the map of Facebook users, or the map of Wikipedia edits? It turns out that they all look pretty similar.
The earth at night in the year 2000, source: NASA
Facebook users and the connections between them, source:...
July 2011
2 posts
Catholic Relief Services and allourideas
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is an NGO that provides assistance to poor and vulnerable people in nearly 100 countries. To provide these services, CRS employs more than 4,000 people in 150 offices around the world. Collecting feedback in a bottom-up, participatory way from such a large and diverse group is a huge challenge.
As part of an organizational development project, CRS used All Our...
democratic democracy index, part 2
Crowdsourced democracy rankings, darker countries were voted as more democratic (Source: Xavier Marquez)
In an earlier post, I descried an effort by Xavier Marquez, a political science professor in New Zealand, to produce a crowdsourced democracy index of countries. Since then, he has had many more votes, some from readers of this blog. With all of this new data, he compared the crowdsourced...
June 2011
3 posts
customized urls and data
One of the nice things about All Our Ideas is that we don’t have accounts and log-ins for voters; they just visit the idea marketplace and start voting. This is great because it maximizes the amount of data collected and helps minimizes barriers to participation.
The absence of accounts can be a limitation, however, because it makes it hard to collect demographic information about...
all our ideas in italian
I am happy to announce that the voter-facing portions of the site have now been translated into Italian. Grazie to the volunteer translator Gianluca Torresani.
All Our Ideas is now available in six languages other than English thanks to the great work of volunteers. If you would like to help translate the site into another language, please send me an email.
making new york greener and greater
Previously we announced that the New York City Mayor’s Office was using allourideas to engage citizens in shaping PlaNYC, the city’s long term sustainability plan. To do this, the Mayor’s Office created an idea marketplace, seeded it with 25 ideas (e.g., “open schoolyards across the city as public playgrounds” and “increase targeted tree plantings in...
May 2011
2 posts
media and all our ideas
One of the main types of groups to use All Our Ideas has been newspapers. They tend to use the widget to get reader reaction to stories, but Megan Garber of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab presents some other ideas in this blog post about all our ideas and journalism.
Also, here are a bunch of examples from newspapers including The Washington Post, TBD, The Seattle Times, and The...
languages and all our ideas
Location of votes collected at www.allourideas.org
I like to say that All Our Ideas allows groups around the world to collect and prioritize ideas in a way that is democratic, transparent, and efficient. As the map above shows, we do indeed process votes from pretty much all around the world. However, in order to reach even more people, our community of users has started translating the...
April 2011
2 posts
calgary, all our ideas, and civic participation
Calgary is using All Our Ideas as part of their very interesting participatory budgeting process. Their idea marketplace, described more here, is one of the most active that we have seen, and right now 4 of the top 5 ideas were uploaded by visitors. If you live in Calgary, spread the word and make your voice heard.
Update: As of April 26, 2011, more than 1,000 ideas have been uploaded and...
crowdsource your crowdsourcing
You might be thinking about using All Our Ideas to crowdsource ideas from members of your community. In the past, they had been able to participate by voting and adding new ideas, but now we’ve enabled them to participate in a new way: by installing a widget on their webpage or blog. We expect that this new feature, which allows you to “crowdsource your crowdsourcing,” will...
March 2011
2 posts
passing more information into the widget
All Our Ideas is a tool for research, and we are constantly trying to enable richer data collection and analysis. Therefore, we are proud to announce a new feature that makes it possible for you to “attach” information to each vote. This should enable you to better understand who cares about what, and will greatly enhance the kind of analysis that you can do.
If you are using our...
democratic democracy index
Xavier Marquez, a political science professor in New Zealand, used allourideas in his class “Dictatorships and Revolutions” to produce a crowdsourced ranking of which countries are the most democratic. He then compared the results to more established rankings like the one from Freedom House, and the results were pretty interesting; you should read about them on his blog (and here’s an...
February 2011
1 post
What does democracy mean?
Given the democratic protests taking place right now, one may wonder, what does “democracy” mean to people in the Middle East and North Africa? How might that be different than what “democracy” means to people in the United States and Europe?
Mark Belinsky from Digital Democracy was wondering the same thing so he created two idea marketplaces at All Our Ideas to find...
January 2011
2 posts
One million votes and counting
I am happy to announce that All Our Ideas has now collected more than 1,000,000 votes. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible. Next stop: 10,000,000.
download your data
We created allourideas.org to improve the way that groups collect information, and now we are making it easy for you to download your data from our site. I’m hoping that once more people have their hands on their data, we’ll start to discover cool new ways to learn from it.
To further facilitate this development, we are happy to release all the data from one of our largest idea...
December 2010
2 posts
more funding from Google has arrived :)
So far allourideas.org has been supported by generous funding from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and Google. Now, we are happy to announce that we have received a second Google Faculty Research Award. This means that allourideas.org will continue active development for another year.
We are looking forward to lots of cool things in 2011. Happy new year.
Who had the worst year in Washington?
The Washington Post just launched their second idea marketplace to see “Who had the worst year in Washington?” They have had almost 40,000 votes in less than four days, and right now 4 of the 5 ideas were uploaded by users. I am looking forward to seeing the final results.
November 2010
5 posts
Craigslist Foundation and allourideas
Craigslist Foundation recently used allourideas to help name their new knowledge sharing portal. Several thousand votes later they arrived at …
Here’s a bit more about this cool project which is coming soon: “Community builders need access to success stories from other communities to discover best practices, strategies and proven methods. We propose creating a tool that...
allourideas ♥ NY and NY ♥ allourideas
Everyone loves New York, that’s why we are happy that New York loves allourideas. In fact, the New York City Government is currently using it for two projects:
The Department of Parks and Recreation is using allourideas.org to prioritize residents’ ideas for the new master plan for the parks in Northern Manhattan.
The New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and...
washingtonpost.com using allourideas widget
The Washington Post is using an allourideas widget as part of their Holiday Gift Guide. What’s the hot gift for the session? Check the widget to find out.
CITP and allourideas in Princeton Alumni Weekly
The Center for Information Technology Policy, one of our generous funders and an all around cool place, was on the cover of the November 17th issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Here’s a link to the story that describes many of the projects they support including allourideas.
Results from the OECD education idea marketplace
As we announced earlier, the OECD recently launched an idea marketplace to collect ideas about global priorities for education. How did it turn out? In just one month, people from more than 90 countries collectively cast more than 27,000 votes.
Equally impressive, these participants uploaded 325 new ideas, again from all over the world.
The top five ideas (shown below) were presented to...
September 2010
2 posts
Scott Sipprelle for Congress and allourideas
Scott Sipprelle, who is running for U.S. Congress, has been using allourideas as part of his campaign’s effort to listen to citizens. One often hears rhetoric like that from politicians, so it is nice to see someone actually doing it in new ways.
So far, the campaign has created two idea marketplaces:
What should be Scott’s most important focus as your new Congressman?
What do...
OECD and allourideas
The OECD is launching an idea marketplace today to collect ideas about global priorities for education. The top five ideas as voted on by the community will be shown to education ministers, global business leaders, technical experts, and academics from around the world during the OECD Education Policy Forum to be held at the OECD in Paris on November 4, 2010.
This is an interesting attempt at...
August 2010
3 posts
add google analytics on your idea marketplace
All Our Ideas provides rich analytics about the results of your idea marketplace and now we offer tracking of your traffic through Google Analytics. This will allow you to learn more about who is visiting your idea marketplace or widget.
Full instructions for how to install Google Analytics in your idea marketplace are below.To start tracking with Google Analytics
Sign-up for google analytics...
Four tips for making a successful idea marketplace
In order to celebrate the creation of our 400th idea marketplace, here are some tips that I frequently share with idea marketplace creators. If you have other advice, please add it below.
Make sure you have enough ideas
One of the most common problems I see is that people start their idea marketplaces with too few ideas. This makes the voting process boring for your visitors. Try to come up...
improved widget gives you more control
A few weeks ago we launched the allourideas widget which lets you embed an idea marketplace in your website or blog (much like you can embed a youtube video). Now we have improved the widget by allowing you to fully control the size and colors. This customization enable you to fit the widget into your website more elegantly and provides a better experience for your voters. Further, we allow you...
July 2010
5 posts
API released open source
The main allourideas.org website is powered by our custom-built API. We have now released this toolkit to everyone. Would you like to contribute to the project? Build your own pairwise comparison website? Maybe an app for mobile phones? Create something cool that we haven’t even dream of yet?
Check out our getting started guide on github and enjoy. Feedback and feature requests are...
How do people use www.allourideas.org?
As I said in my first post, we have had about 250 idea marketplaces created and have collected about 65,000 votes (see map). One question that I get asked frequently is what are these people doing?
Here are some examples of how people are using their idea marketplaces:
The professor of Sociology 101 at Berkeley used it to allow students to set priorities for the final exam review session...
widget: embed an idea marketplace in your website
Please read my newer post about our improved widget.
Just for the record, here is the old blog post about the widget.
So far, if you wanted to use an idea marketplace it had to happen at our site: www.allourideas.org. But now, just as you can embed a video from youtube into your site, you can embed an idea marketplace in your site using our new widget functionality. For example,...
Hello world
allourideas.org launched about six months ago, and we’ve learned a lot so far. Already visitors to the site have created more than 250 idea marketplaces in four different languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. To these idea marketplaces, communities have added more than 1,500 ideas and cast more than 60,000 votes. We’ve had voters from six continents, but we’re...