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)
Social Media has tremendous potential for innovation and problem solving, but existing tools such as blogs, wikis, and comment lists can be quickly overwhelmed by extreme viewpoints.
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.
Understand the distribution of views of their community
Discover insightful ideas and suggestions
Opinion Space is designed to help community members:
Engage with other members
Understand their relationships to other members
Consider a diversity of other viewpoints
Express their own ideas
It works like this: new participants use graphical sliders to express the degree to which they agree or disagree with five baseline statements such as: "I'm very interested in issue A", "I am an active user of product B". These responses are combined to display the new participant as a unique point in a map. The map is not based on predetermined categories, but on similarity of interests, behavior, and perspectives. It is designed to "depolarize" discussions by including all participants on a single level playing field.
Participants click on the points of other community members to read ideas and suggestions on discussion topics such as "What new approaches could be used to address issue C? "What features would you like to see in a new version of product D?". Participants evaluate the ideas of others and enter their own ideas. Participants earn points as Reviewers based on how they evaluate the ideas of others and earn points as Authors based on how others rate their own ideas.
In February, the US Department of State began using Version 3.0 of Opinion Space, with a competely redesigned and streamlined interface with improved splash page, colors, fonts, more intuitive welcome process, registration, user experience, animated point and score displays, and enhanced response reputation metrics.
Contact for more information:
Ken Goldberg
IEOR and EECS, College of Engineering and School of Information
425 Sutardja Dai Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1758
(510) 643-9565, http://goldberg.berkeley.edu
goldberg@berkeley.edu