Over the last two days, 1book140, The Atlantic’s Twitter book club, has been trying out the WeDo system to test a possible way for us to choose books. WeDo is an experimental Twitter nominations and voting system by @hqz, @andresmh, and other researchers at MIT and Microsoft Research. I wanted to learn more about how it worked — BEFORE we actually relied on it for a vote. 🙂
The vote was held at: http://wedo.csail.mit.edu/publicmissions/4
To bookies, Thank you SO MUCH for trying it out with me — our test revealed some glitches and some needs before we would ever use it for our real votes. Tomorrow, I’ll post nominations on The Atlantic in the usual way (and include all of the tweets from today in the list).
I’m also planning to ask further about what other people think about trying out new ways to vote.
Add your questions and feedback in the comments. Here are mine:
- I loved being able to vote on Twitter, but is there any way to also accept votes from a poll? We get lots of new Twitter users, and not everyone who reads and votes is on Twitter yet
- Can we embed WeDos into another page? We can get more people to participate if we post nominations and the vote to The Atlantic page, 1book140.org, and elswhere
- I love that this works on mobile and on the desktops. Nice one!
- I liked seeing the tweets, but can we have a leaderboard? It was hard to see what books had votes. People like to campaign for their favourites, and it wasn’t easy to see where my favourite sat in the running
- I love the automatic scoring of tweets, but the software doesn’t properly capture retweets. Lots of people RTed the tweet about Adichie’s novel and added their own comments, which is awesome, but the system didn’t count them as votes for Adichie
- Can the winner be clearer? I *think* The Ocean at the End of the Lane won, but it’s hard to tell
- Can the tweets be grouped so we can look at more of them at a time? This was a small test, but if we had posted it to The Atlantic, we might have gotten many, many more tweets. Sometimes we get 40 or 50 nominations
- Can you omit general requests for participation from the list of proposals? General messages will probably get a lot of retweets, even if they’re not a proposal
Add your questions and comments in the feedback. And let’s try to be positive! Whether or not we choose to use it, @hqz and @andresmh are making interesting software. Companies like TwitPolls can do Twitter polls, but WeDo tries to accept nominations from Twitter too, which is much harder to get right! I’m sure they would appreciate your feedback!