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.
Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have started using allourideas.org to help articulate goals. You can:
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. Of course Becki could have sat down at her desk and created a list of people. But, these would have been the people that she thought were best, and what Becki really wanted was a list of the people that her members thought were best.
Becki had heard about allourideas.org from a Beth Kanter blog post about crowdsourcing, and she decided to give it a try. 24,000 votes and 60 ideas later, the choices were clear. Shar McBee, the top scoring suggestion, is already booked to give the webinar on April 18th, and Becki is in the process of inviting other members from the list.
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.
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 of pins is by “Gmaxwell” and is available from Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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 Ideas to ask their employees what makes an excellent worker, more specifically, “Which phrase better describes an EXEMPLARY CRS staff member (any CRS staff member, anywhere)?”. To answer this question Stephen Moles from CRS launched three idea marketplaces—in English, French, and Spanish—that collected more than 20,000 votes and 100 new ideas from all over the organization. The results from the idea marketplaces were then refined and combined through a series of participatory focus groups. CRS has now completed the process, and here are the four key competencies that will be used to guide recruitment and career development globally:
Even cooler than this list, I think, was the process used to create it.
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 rankings to the Freedom House rankings, a widely used source. He found:
The correlation between Freedom House and the crowdsourced index is a fairly high 0.84 (which is about as high as the correlation between the combined Freedom House score and the Polity2 score for 2008: 0.87).
You can read more about the results—there is lots of cool analysis—at Xavier’s blog: http://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/crowdsourcing-democracy-index-update.html
This might be the kind of thing that would be cool to do in different languages.
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 voters. However, we’ve now taken steps to solve this problem. Using customized urls, you can now have better information about the characteristics of your voters.
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.
