All Our Ideas

All Our Ideas is a platform that enables groups to collect and prioritize ideas in a transparent, democratic, and bottom-up way. It’s a suggestion box for the digital age.

As a research project, All Our Ideas seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to “bubble up” from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups.

By combining a simple voting process with open uploading of ideas, the best ideas in your group will bubble to the top. You can vote as little or as much as you want, and you can stop voting at any time.

You can add as many ideas as you have. Once an idea is added, it may be reviewed by the person who created the idea marketplace in order to ensure that it is not inappropriate. Once the idea has been reviewed, it will start appearing for people to vote on it.

The first project using this approach for decision-making was a collaboration with the Princeton student government, called “Which do you want more?”, which was launched in November 2008. All Our Ideas was then launched in February 2010.