opensourceway via flickr
Have you ever been frustrated by the limitations on electronic surveys? After spending hours creating neutral questions and creating the universe of potential solutions, you find that people keep selecting the “other” box with something you accidentally left off.
One possible solution is looking at crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, not to be confused with crowdsurfing, is a means allows users to create and vote on each others’ answers to questions or problems. Instead of the surveyor populating the survey, the users are able to come up with, vote on, and discuss their own answers. Users can vote up or down answers that they feel are relevant or irrelevant. In the end, the planner as moderator can get an idea of the most popular ideas as well as potentially new ideas. The user oriented nature can also encourage users to share the survey with their friends providing input from wider groups than your initial contacts.
