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 download 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.

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.

There is a new paper using wiki surveys by Jeff Niederdeppe and colleagues: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/10684

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.

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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)

https://github.com/allourideas/allourideas.org/releases/tag/v4.0.0

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.

https://github.com/allourideas/pairwise-api/releases/tag/v4.0.0

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.

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allourideas now enables https encryption.  To try it out, just visit https://www.allourideas.org.  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.