Over the last 6 months my work environment seems to have gone poll-crazy. Hardly a week goes by when some department on campus or some professional organization isn’t sending a survey invitation. And I’m happy to participate, but it kind of stinks when you rarely see the results. And from a technological reason there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to see the results on-line — in fact I want to see the running results immediately after I finish the survey. So let’s all start advocating for greater transparency in the poll and surveys we participate it.
There are a number of ajax-powered WordPress plugins that allow exactly this type of behavior. You answer the Poll and upon completion you can see what the running results are. And you can return later and see the latest results. This is easy enough for standard poll-format questions. But how about where people submit a written response? In this case it would be cool to offer some type of tag-cloud keyword display — and if you click on a keywork you could see a pop-up list of all matching responses. Perhaps you’d have some open-format responses that would be private, but this would be the exception. Again this would be a bit of a programming challenge, but not too hard for someone who knows what they are doing. I would even offer a comment field on the results page, in case the viewer has some follow-up thoughts.
Transparent, open and immediate feedback in polls and surveys. Make the person participating part of the discussion. It really turns the typical process on its head, and will certainly make many people nervous. But I think the results you get from this type of process will ultimately get better results, build trust and greater involvement from your community.
PHP « Programming « Portfolio | lesterchan.net
Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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