allourideas

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Apr 15
2024
allourideas.org is being reborn
We are delighted to announce that the All Our Ideas project will soon be housed within
Citizens Foundation
, a non-profit based in Iceland and the United States.  All Our Ideas will remain free to use and open-source.
As many of our users know, All Our Ideas started out as a research project housed at the
Center for Information Technology Policy
at
Princeton University
.  We are now happy to evolve into a project focused on social good.
As part of this transition, there will be many positive changes:
Updated website with new features, including GPT-4 integration
Improved web hosting capacity
Modernized version of the codebase, with easy Docker-based deployment
Support for government partnerships, including consulting, technical support, customization, and service level agreements
Citizens Foundation was founded in Iceland in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, and it is an ideal place for All Our Ideas to continue to thrive.  Since it was founded, Citizens Foundation has worked with governments in more than 45 countries to use technology to support democratic deliberation.
Finally, on a personal note, I’d like to say thank you all for everything.  All Our Ideas would not have been possible without the
support of many amazing people and organizations
.  I’m looking forward to all the excitement to come.
Matt
FAQ
Will allourideas.org be shutting down?
Sort of.  The version of allourideas.org that was housed at Princeton will be shutting down, and the version of allourideas.org that is housed at Citizens Foundation will be starting up.  The transition will happen in the fall of 2024 with the exact date to be determined.
Will data from allourideas.org be transferred from the project housed at Princeton to the project housed at Citizens Foundation?
No.  These are two separate systems.  Wiki survey creators the Princeton version of allourideas.org can
the data from their wiki survey before it shuts down.
Can I see the new modernized code?
Of course.  Here is the
open-source code
Has Citizens Foundation ever done something like this before?
Absolutely.  Citizens Foundation has been developing and supporting a system similar to All Our Ideas called
Your Priorities
.  You can learn more on the
Citizens Foundation website
and
Citizens Foundation Wikipedia page
Can you share more about the research that came out of this project?
Of course.  Here’s a paper that Karen Levy and I published titled “
Wiki Surveys: Open and quantifiable social data collection
”.  I also wrote about this project in my book
Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age
Jan 03
2021
wiki survey widgets are no longer supported
We launch
wiki survey widgets in July 2010
. The goal of these widgets was to allow wiki survey creators to embed their wiki survey in another website.This meant that creators could bring their wiki survey to their participants, rather than trying to bring their participants to their wiki survey. Now, more than 10 years, we are sad to announce that we can no longer support these widgets.
We cannot support widgets any more because of recent web browsers changes designed to promote privacy and security.  More specifically, third-party cookies are now blocked by default in some browsers, and others have added new standards that require changes to applications for continued working of third-party cookies. Content within an iframe is considered third-party, which is the mechanism that the All Our Ideas site has used for years with great success. However, due to the restrictions on third-party cookies the widget no longer works in the majority of browsers. Overall, we think these changes to web browsers are improvements, but we have chosen not to undertake the considerable effort that would be required to continue to enable widgets.
Finally, we want to thank Brian Tubergen who wrote the widget functionality in 2010 as part of a project supported by the Google Summer of Code program.
Jun 29
2019
New paper using wiki surveys
There is a new paper using wiki surveys by Jeff Niederdeppe and colleagues:
Here’s the title and abstract:
Embedding a Wiki Platform Within a Traditional Survey: A Novel Approach to Assess Perceived Argument Strength in Communication Research
Several prominent theories predict that argument strength plays an important role in
message processing and effects. Traditional strategies to measure perceived argument
strength have limitations in responsivity to emerging arguments in public discourse. This
article examines the utility of a survey-embedded wiki platform (wiki survey) to identify
strong and weak arguments in dynamic information environments. Participants completed
two wiki surveys, embedded within a larger survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,506), asking
them to choose between randomly selected pairs of arguments related to marijuana
legalization or to add new arguments to the item pools. The method identified 32 novel,
user-generated arguments, over and above an original set of 26 arguments identified by
study authors through a review of the literature and a content analysis of news media

Embedding a Wiki Platform Within a Traditional Survey: A Novel Approach to Assess Perceived Argument Strength in Communication Research

coverage on the topic. The wiki survey also produced variation in perceived strength of
arguments among relevant demographic and social groups.
Dec 20
2018
The Rams Are Dead To Me, So I Answered 3,352 Questions To Find A New NFL Team
This video shows how
Blythe Terrell
from
FiveThirtyEight
used allourideas.org to help her find a new football team.
This story
provides even more information.
Dec 12
2018
Encuestas Wiki vs. Sesgos de expertos
Amalio Rey has just posted an interesting blog post about wiki surveys on El Blog de Inteligencia Colectiva (in Spanish):
Feb 12
2018
allourideas 4.0
We are very happy to announce the release of allourideas 4.0 and pairwise API 4.0.  Thank you to everyone that has contributed.
Improvements in allourideas 4.0
Add link to documentation in CSV download email.
Allow admins to toggle “add new idea” feature.
Allow admins to toggle “can’t decide” option.
Allow uppercase characters in wiki survey URLs.
Allow admins to activate / deactivate wiki surveys.
Improve manual process of create CSV exports.
New spammy looking surveys are set to pending and must be approved.
Allow admins to hide results.
Add translations for: Czech, Japanese, Indonesian
Add guide for each vote option.
Add links to similar ideas in new idea email.
Add better error handling for Ajax requests.
upgrade Bootstrap to 2.3.2 (deployed 2014-04-07T14:22:32Z)
Improvements in pairwise-API 4.0
Drop support for Ruby 1.8.7.
Add tau and alpha as parameters to catchup algorithm.
Record which algorithm was used to select a prompt.
Add similar choice method to find similar (currently only identical) choices.
Retry transaction when creating appearance if get deadlocked.
Aug 18
2017
wiki surveys for multilingual groups
One question that I often receive is about how to handle wiki surveys with multilingual groups.  For example, a city government might want to collect ideas from residents, but these residents might not all speak the same language.  Although the voter facing portions of allourideas.org have been
translated into more than 10 languages
, running multiple languages in the same wiki survey is not really possible because the ideas all need to be in one language.  So, in this post I’ll describe some possible workarounds.
In the case of a multilingual population, I think there are two main options.  The first option is to run completely parallel wiki surveys in the different languages.  For example, the city could have one wiki survey in French and one in Spanish.  Then, the city could compare results across these two language groups.  The second option is to run linked parallel wiki surveys.  In this case, when an idea is uploaded in Spanish, the city would translate it and uploaded it to the French wiki survey.  This keeps the ideas in each wiki survey moving in sync.  This linked parallel wiki survey approached was used by
Catholic Relief Services
Finally, I should note that there is one option that I don’t think will work, which is machine translating uploaded ideas.  In my experience, the uploaded ideas are relatively short (and always less than 140 characters) and rely on a lot of implicit knowledge.  In these situations machine translation does not seem to work well.
I hope the ideas of parallel wiki surveys and linked parallel wiki surveys can be helpful to groups made of people speaking multiple languages.
Jul 11
2017
https enabled
allourideas now enables
https encryption
.  To try it out, just visit
.  Please let us know if you run into any unexpected behavior.  After a pilot test, we plan to re-route all traffic to https.
We are excited to be able to offer this added security to our users, and we would like to thank
Let’s Encrypt
for making the process easier.
Jul 11
2017
allourideas in German
I am happy to announce that the voter-facing portions of the site
have now been translated into German.  Thank you to volunteer translators Katrin Auspurg, Sebastian Esser, Florian Keusch, and Abraham Bernstein.
All Our Ideas is now available in 17 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.
Sep 08
2016
allourideas in Indonesian
I am happy to announce that the voter-facing portions of the site
have now been translated into Indonesian.  Thank you to volunteer translators
Smita Sjahputri
and
Roby Muhamad
All Our Ideas is now available in 16 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.