Developed at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

, "Opinion Space" (also known as The Collective Discovery Engine) is a

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

technology designed to help communities generate and exchange ideas about important issues and policies. Version 1.0 was launched on April 4, 2009 at UC Berkeley, and explored the question "Do you think

legalizing marijuana The legality of cannabis for medical and recreational use varies by country, in terms of its possession, distribution, and cultivation, and (in regards to medical) how it can be consumed and what medical conditions it can be used for. These ...

is a good idea?" It has since undergone 4 different iterations, and been used in partnership with various organizations including The

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and econo ...

(Version 4.0, 5/24/2013) and the African Robots Network (Version 4.0, 5/25/2013). Opinion Space has also been used in collaboration with the

United States State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other nat ...

and the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

's Berkeley Center for New Media (Version 2.0, 12/1/2009 and Version 3.0, 2/25/2012Department of State Launches New Tool to Foster Online Open Dialogue March 15, 2010 http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/03/138326.htm) to gain public perspective on foreign policy issues. Then U.S. Secretary of State

Hillary Rodham Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States senat ...

explained, "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" (2010). The website uses data visualization and statistical analysis to present and develop

public opinion Public opinion is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to a society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. Etymology The term "public opinion" was derived from the French ', which was first use ...

and ideas. Opinion Space is a

self-organizing Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order and disorder, order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spon ...

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 A deliberative opinion poll, sometimes called a deliberative poll, is a form of opinion poll that incorporates the principles of deliberative democracy. Professor James S. Fishkin of Stanford University first described the concept in 1988. The typi ...

collaborative filtering Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...

, and multidimensional visualization.

Scholarly work

* * * * * * {{cite book, chapter=A Spatial Model for Collaborative Filtering of Comments in an Online Discussion Forum, author=Ephrat Bitton, title=Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Recommender systems - Rec ''Sys'' '09, publisher=Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, year=2009, page=393, doi=10.1145/1639714.1639797, isbn=9781605584355, s2cid=17631067, chapter-url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1639797

References

External links

Opinion Space

general information about the project from UC Berkeley
Opinion polling in the United States Social media

See also

Scholarly work

References

External links