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 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.

If you spread the url of your idea marketplace through email—and this is one of the most effective ways that we have seen—you can now append information to the urls that you send out.  For example, if your organization has offices in London, New York, and Tokyo, you can record which votes are coming from which offices by sending a different url to each office:

http://www.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=london

http://www.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=newyork

http://www.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=tokyo

Basically anything that you put after “?info=” will be attached to each vote, and it will show up when you download your data.  [Actually, it is a little more complicated than that.  Anything between “?info=” and an ampersand (“&”) or then end of the URL (whichever comes first) will show up in the data file.]

You could even create a code that is specific to each person.  For example, you could send me the following url:

http://www.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=matt@allourideas.org

If your group has information about each of its members—for example, a university might have information about class year, gender, and major of all students—that information could now be linked to the votes.  This linkage of additional information would allow you to estimate more subtle features of public opinion such as which ideas are most favored by women or which ideas have the biggest male/female difference in support.  If you are worried about privacy, you can also do this matching anonymously by using a cryptographic hash.  This hash would mean that you would send me an email with the url:

http://www.allourideas.org/[your_url]?info=fgksdfg8234kadfgSDF24t

Then the person providing you with the database would remove names and replace them with hashes (like fgksdfg8234kadfgSDF24t).  This procedure allows you to match votes with demographics without easily identifying the voters.  I am looking forward to seeing all the creative ways that this new capability get used.

The photo of footprints on the beach is by Pete and Linz.