While poking around Project Bamboo, I followed a lot of trails that led me to tools that sounded interesting, but which didn’t seem to have a practical application that I could entirely understand.
But there were two sites I stumbled across that intrigued me.
One is All Our Ideas (allourideas.org), which combines surveys and crowdsourcing. To a degree, it works kind of like Kitten War: under a given topic, two options pop up and you can vote on which you prefer; there is also an ‘I Can’t Decide’ button, and a blank field where you can contribute your own idea, which makes the survey a constantly evolving entity. As people vote on the successive pairs of options, the favored ideas bubble up to the top.
The sample survey is one relevant to us all: it looks at options for a greener New York City. It was difficult for me to STOP voting (I have a lot of opinions). I’m not thinking this would be useful for the Morningside Heights project, but rather for the Developing Librarian project itself. When we are faced with difficult decisions about where to go next, or what to prioritize, this site could help.
The other tool that caught my attention is called Exploratree (www.exploratree.org.uk) (the play on words works better with a UK pronunciation). It offers a series of templates–or, ‘thinking guides’– that help organize workflows for projects. As wecontinue our collaborative work, it might help clarify our thinking to slot our tasks into one of the flowcharts on this site.