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 dramatically increase the amount of data collected and the diversity of people reached.

To see how “crowdsource your crowdsourcing” might work, consider the recent project where the New York City Mayor’s Office used All Our Ideas to collect ideas to make New York a greener and greater place.  They were able to collect more than 25,000 votes and 300 new ideas, ideas which proved very valuable: many of the top scoring ideas were uploaded by visitors.  However, what if they wanted to increase their participation by a factor of 10 or even 100?  With our new feature, that is now possible.  Instead of just asking people to vote and upload, they could also ask community members to embed a widget in their blog or website.  Thus, the voting and uploading could take place all over the web, not just at www.allourideas.org or the City’s website.  By distributing the avenues for participation, the city could reach a larger, more diverse group of people and could receive dozens or even hundreds of streams of information simultaneously.  All Our Ideas will seamlessly aggregate all of that information into a single set of results. 

In addition to aggregating the results, we also track where each vote is happening (and provide the information that you when you download your data).  Thus, this tracking enables you to de-aggregate your votes to figure out where participation is coming from and to compare the votes from the different sources.  For example, you could use the downloaded data files to see that many votes are coming from blogs about bicycles and that this community, in addition to being excited about bicycles, also seems to strongly support tree planting initiatives.

Here’s how to do actually do this; it just takes a minute.  Go to the admin page of your idea marketplace (e.g., http://www.allourideas.org/[your url]/admin).  Then scroll down to near the bottom of the page and find the widget embed code

Then just sent that code to your community and ask them to paste it into their blogs and websites.  In fact, with a little editing, they can even customize the size and color of the widget.

If you have any questions, please post them below and we will answer them.