We are delighted to announce that the All Our Ideas project will now be housed within Citizen Foundation, a non-profit based in Iceland and the United States. As part of this transition, alllourideas.org will be reborn as all-our-ideas.citizen.is. All Our Ideas will remain free to use and open-source.
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
Citizen 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, Citizen 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?
Yes. All new wiki surveys should be created at all-our-ideas.citizen.is.
Will data from allourideas.org be transferred to all-our-ideas.citizen.is?
No. These are two separate systems. Wiki survey creators at allourideas.org can download the data from their wiki survey before allourideas.org shuts down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
