"Opinion Space will harness the power of connection technologies to provide a unique forum for international dialogue. This is...an opportunity to extend our engagement beyond the halls of government directly to the people of the world." U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 2010

Developed at UC Berkeley, "Opinion Space" is a new social media technology designed to help communities generate and exchange ideas about important issues and policies. A version of Opinion Space is being used by the U.S. State Department, where it has attracted thousands of participants from around the world to organize, visualize, and analyze constructive suggestions on foreign policy. Opinion Space is a self-organizing system that uses an intuitive graphical "map" that displays patterns, trends, and insights as they emerge and employs the wisdom of crowds to identify and highlight the most insightful ideas. The system uses a game model that incorporates techniques from deliberative polling, collaborative filtering, and multidimensional visualization.

Versions of Opinion Space (also known as Collective Discovery Engine)

Active as of March 2013:

Discussion Topic	Launch Date
In what specific ways could African ingenuity be engaged in designing and manufacturing a new class of affordable educational robots for high school students in Africa and beyond?	03/25/2013
How Social Media can benefit primary and secondary education?	07/15/2012

Completed:

Publications

A Spatial Model for Collaborative Filtering of Comments in an Online Discussion Forum. Ephrat Bitton. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems.2009.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1639797

Opinion Space: A Scalable Tool for Browsing Online Comments. Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Kimiko Ryokai, Ken Goldberg. ACM International Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). Atlanta, GA. April 2010.
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/pubs/chi-2010-opinion-space.pdf

The Diversity Donut: Enabling Participant Control Over the Diversity of Recommended Responses. David Wong, Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Bjoern Hartmann, Ken Goldberg. ACM International Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. May 2011.
http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/CHI-2011-Diversity-Donut.pdf

Using a Social Media Platform to Explore How Social Media Can Enhance Primary and Secondary Learning. Sanjay Krishan, Ken Goldberg, Yuko Okubo, Kanji Uchino. The Sixth Conference of MIT's Learning International Networks Consortium. June 2013
http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/krishnan-LINC2013.pdf

Social media and employee voice: the current landscape. Michael Silverman, Elmira Bakhshalian, Laura Hillman. CIPD Research Report on Sustainable Organization Performance. March 2013.
http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/srcipd.pdf

Press about Opinion Space

US Department of State Blog (Dipnote): http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/opinionspace_global_digital_conversation
US. Department of State Announcement: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/03/138326.htm
Harvard Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/03/global-opinions-visualized-the-state-departments-opinion-space/#more-13891
Tech President Blog: http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/state-departments-brand-new-opinion-driven-global-data-visualization-thingy
CBS News: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6307886n&tag=api
UK Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/18/opinion-space-state-department
Government Technology Times: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/750825
Bay Citizen: http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/brainstorm/civility-algorithm/
ICT4Peace: http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/opinion-space-a-compelling-new-initiative-from-us-state-department/
Wired News: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/new-tool-shows/
SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=38849
Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1586879/us-state-department-cozies-up-to-social-media-and-infographics
Network World: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/59390