All Our Ideas

From Faster Than 20

All Our Ideas is an open source polling and idea-generation tool that is developed by the Princeton sociology department. It differs from a traditional survey or crowdsourcing tool in that:

  • It uses pairwise comparisons. Voters choose between two options, and they repeat this process several times
  • Voters see pairs at random, so they are not affected by what's already popular
  • It's harder to game by interest groups, because they have to go through a long series of votes in order to vote up a choice
  • People can add new choices at any time

All Our Ideas has an API that supports custom clients.

Case Studies

  • Wikimedia used it to help select fundraising banners. Lots of great learning from this experiment, including this: The winning results ended up being the poorest performers
  • The Junior League used it to come up with possible training ideas