Zsombor Szabó, creator of OpenMaps, wanted to avoid just that problem with his future releases. To solve the problem, he implemented our IdeaScale iPhone feedback widget within OpenMaps. In just under a day, he was up and running with a new version of OpenMaps, collecting ideas and feedback right within the app – no need to leave the application to send an email or fill out a web form.

“We collected feedback via email, Twitter and GetSatisfaction too, and still do. The IdeaScale iPhone widget was supposed to be an experiment. It turned out to be a hit as we received much more user feedback than before. It seems people really like giving feedback right from within the application.”

Interested in collecting feedback within your iPhone apps? Learn more about the IdeaScale iPhone feedback widget and OpenMaps from the links below.

More Info:

• IdeaScale Cocoa Widget: http://ideascale.com/iphone
• IdeaScale Cocoa Widget Support Portal: http://support.ideascale.com/iphone
• OpenMaps iPhone App: http://j.mp/OpenMaps
• YouTube demo: http://j.mp/OpenMaps3Demo
• IZE Website: http://izeize.com/

Since day-one when we launched IdeaScale, “custom fields on users” have been a consistent request. We have finally got all our ducks in a row to launch this feature. Collecting basic information about your IdeaScale user community is probably one of the most important things you can do. Where are people coming from? How did they hear about your community?

We’ve now made it much easier to gain deeper insight into IdeaScale users by giving you the ability to add questions (or custom fields) to a profile. Now you can add basic questions to the new user registration form. For example, you can ask your users such questions as  ”What is your zip code?” or “What is your age?”.

To add/delete/update custom fields to your users profile: Login->Choose Community->Custom Fields

After adding custom fields, when users signup, they will be asked to fill out the profile. Once you start capturing this data, there are a few neat tools available at your disposal. For example, automated reports for each of the fields are produced. If one of your questions in your custom profile is a “Gender” question, you can get a high level overview of the gender distribution of your community.

Login -> Choose Community -> Reports -> User Report

Searching: If you are looking for users that match a particular profile (Males between 21-25) and would like to search for users within your community that match that profile, you can do that easily.

Login -> Choose Community -> Users -> Search

Exporting Data: Of course the User Export functionality also has been enhanced to include custom fields on the Excel Report.

Login -> Choose Community -> Reports -> Export Data

To solve this problem, we partnered with cavoort.com, an iPhone consultancy, to develop a feedback widget powered by IdeaScale. When added to any iPhone application with just one line of code, feedback can now be collected in real time. Learn about nasty bugs as your users encounter them and fresh ideas as your users dream them up — all directly inside your iPhone application.

Are you an iPhone developer that needs to collect feedback? Try out the IdeaScale cocoa widget for iPhone in your application today.

If you have an iPhone, you can try out this widget now by installing “MeasureMe” in the iTunes application store. Note that version 1.2 or higher of MeasureMe includes the  plugin (as of this writing, it is still awaiting approval in the iTunes App Store).

More Info:

• IdeaScale Cocoa Widget for iPhone Applications: http://ideascale.com/iphone
• Cavoort.com iPhone Consultants: http://cavoort.com
• Integration Instructions from Cavoort: http://cavoort.com/apps/ideascale-iphone-plugin/
• MeasureMe for iPhone: http://cavoort.com/apps/measureme

We’ve now made it much easier to gain deeper insight into IdeaScale users by giving you the ability to add questions (or custom fields) to a profile. Now you can add basic questions to the new user registration form. For example, you can ask your users such questions as  ”What is your zip code?” or “What is your age?”.  In addition, we’ve added the ability to export this user data out to an Excel spreadsheet for offline analytics.

To add custom fields to your users profile:

1. Login to your IdeaScale.com community.
2. Choose the community you’d like to edit.
3. Click the “Settings” tab
4. Click the “Custom Fields” link in the left navigation bar.
5. Choose ”Add New User Custom Field” (or “Add New Custom Field” to add custom fields to an idea)
6. Type in the label and choose the type of question.
7. Done!

More Info:

• Custom fields upon user sign-up: http://ideascale.com/help/561-window.html
• Custom fields upon idea submission: http://ideascale.com/help/552-window.html

We were very pleased with the ease of integration that RPX provided, as well as the flexibility of their sign-in widget. Now when new users visit your IdeaScale community, they’ll see familiar icons to login using their existing accounts. As you can imagine, this greatly streamlines the feedback process for your customers!

More Info:

• RPX Now: https://rpxnow.com/

After this change takes effect, changing your email address will also change your username.  Please take a minute to confirm that the current email address on your account is one that you personally have access in the event you need to make a request for a new password.  Again, this change will take effect November 1, 2009.

As always, any questions or concerns may be directed to our support team at: http://www.questionpro.com/info/contactUs.html

http://openinternet.ideascale.com/a/dtd/17835-6017

Just to be clear: there is nothing that you need to do – old URLs will work just the same.

Am I right?  Is wisdom the outcome we seek? Please comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Romi Mahajan writes about turning data into Wisdom as part of Atigeo, a Bellevue, WA based company building a new breed of “intelligent” technology that connects disparate data in unique ways to create individualized interactions and experiences of unprecedented relevance.

Naturally we thought, “why not crowdsource it?” The end result is an IdeaScale community using our new “poker chip” style voting system.

The rules for this system of voting is simple:

• each user gets 30 votes that they can apply to any of the ideas.
• users can vote more than once – but only up to the allocated 30 votes.
• at any point you can re-allocate your votes if you change your mind.

We then broke up all the main parts of H.R. 3200 into their own ideas on the community. The resulting community allows each user to vote on a section of the bill, deciding which elements of the bill are most important to them.

Take a spin and let us know what you think!

More info:

• HealthcareDebate.com IdeaScale community

I wanted to distill some of the conversations that we’ve had with many agency representatives and give all of you an idea of where we are and our future direction.

Free License for Civic Engagement
We’ve decided to formalize and operationalize an IdeaScale License tailored and designed specifically for Gov Agencies – Federal, State and Local. So far we’ve made this available on an Ad-Hoc and case by case basis, but as of today we will allow any Gov Agency to use IdeaScale for free – We are calling this the IdeaScale Civic Engagement License. Most of you on this list already have this license – but just in case details on this :
http://ideascale.com/opengov

Open ID – Single Signon – Integration
A recurring theme has been around OpenId/Single Signon using OpenID and Drupal. I have had personal conversations with many of you around this and want to let you know that we take this seriously. We will be putting our heads to work over the next couple of weeks to come up with a series of solutions. Our initial goal is to make IdeaScale work seamlessly with a Drupal Installation so users do not have to login multiple times. We will also be working on integrating with other OpenID providers (Google, Yahoo etc.) as well as other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Best Practice and Recommedations
One of the themes that I heard was to create a specific set of guidelines and recomendations for best-practice for launching crowdsourcing initiatives. We have some internal recomendation (that work on the commercial side) but then like all good things – Gov Initiatives have their own set of challenges. I have talked to Lena Trudeau (NAPA) about sharing such details with with the rest of us so we all can learn from it. Here are some brief issues that we all should consider:

• Moderation Policy – Have a clear moderation policy and explain that to the end-user.
• Seed Ideas from an internal audience before launch
• Phased Rollout – Invite key (and trusted) members of the communitty to begin the engagement process and then roll it out to the larger userbase (blog post, twitter/fb update)
• Enable Twitter integration and create/resuse a hashtag. Monitor the twitter hashtag very closely.

Moderation Vs. Speech Suppression
This is obviosly a very sensitive issue and there are a few enhancements that we think we can do to make life easier for everyone:

1. Have a link that displays all the ideas/comments that have been “flagged” – this will allow users to get to the flagged ideas, but they will not be visible on the front page.
2. The same can apply to comments also.

Upload Vidoes / You Tube Integration
Another idea that was discussed was the ability for users to upload videos as part of the idea submission process. YouTube has an API and we probably can piggy back on that to allow for that functionality.

Some Implementations
Here are some links to implementations of IdeaScale that are live – this will give you an idea of how agencies are using IdeaScale. We have a few other projects that are on track, but since they are not public yet, we can’t share more. We will share more of them on next month’s update.

• http://broadband.ideascale.com (FCC)
• http://healthcaredebate.com
• http://opengov.ideascale.com (OSTP)

TOS Agreement with GSA
I know some of you are aware of this, but I wanted to point out and reiterate that IdeaScale and many other Web 2.0 sites – Flickr, YouTube etc. have signed a Terms Of Service Amendment Agreement with the GSA as a template for engagement with Federal Agencies. If your agency does not already have this executed with IdeaScale we’ve put a very simple and effecient process for doing this : Please send an email to usgovernment@surveyanalytics.com. So far the following Federal Agencies have ToS agreements:

• Executive Office of the President (EOP)
• General Services Admin (GSA)
• Federal Communication Commission (FCC)
• Department of Energy (DoE)

Apart from these Gov specific enhancements, we will be making many other enhancements from our own IdeaScale site (http://ideas.ideascale.com) – if you have ideas on improving IdeaScale please feel free to share them with us.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who have supported us through Gov 2.0 and for the wonderful conversations we’ve had. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.