Opinion Space Explained

Developed at UC Berkeley, "Opinion Space" (also known as The Collective Discovery Engine) is a social media technology designed to help communities generate and exchange ideas about important issues and policies.^[1] Version 1.0 was launched on April 4, 2009 at UC Berkeley, and explored the question "Do you think legalizing marijuana is a good idea?" It has since undergone 4 different iterations, and been used in partnership with various organizations including The Occupy movement (Version 4.0, 5/24/2013^[2]) and the African Robots Network (Version 4.0, 5/25/2013^[3]). Opinion Space has also been used in collaboration with the United States State Department and the University of California's Berkeley Center for New Media (Version 2.0, 12/1/2009^[4] and Version 3.0, 2/25/2012^[5]) to gain public perspective on foreign policy issues. Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton 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 and ideas. Opinion Space is a self-organizing 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, collaborative filtering, and multidimensional visualization.

See also

• Foreign policy of the United States
• Emergent democracy
• Deliberative opinion poll
• Online consultation
• Recommender system

Scholarly work

• Web site: Distributed Spectral Dimensionality Reduction for Visualizing Textual Data. Sanjay Krishnan and Ken Goldberg. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Spectral Learning Methods, Atlanta, GA. June 2013. 2013-07-27. 2014-08-11. https://web.archive.org/web/20140811093209/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/krishnan-icml-spectral-workshop2013.pdf. dead.
• Web site: Using a Social Media Platform to Explore How Social Media Can Enhance Primary and Secondary Learning. Sanjay Krishan, Ken Goldberg, Yuko Okubo, Kanji Uchino. The Sixth Conference of MIT's Learning International Networks Consortium. June 2013. 2013-07-27. 2016-01-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20160109193232/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/krishnan-LINC2013.pdf. dead.
• Web site: Social media and employee voice: the current landscape. Michael Silverman, Elmira Bakhshalian, Laura Hillman. CIPD Research Report on Sustainable Organization Performance. March 2013. 2013-07-27. 2013-05-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20130509234637/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/pubs/srcipd.pdf. dead.
• Web site: The Diversity Donut: Enabling Participant Control Over the Diversity of Recommended Responses. David Wong, Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Bjoern Hartmann, Ken Goldberg.. ACM International Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. May 2011.
• Web site: Opinion Space: A Scalable Tool for Browsing Online Comments. Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Kimiko Ryokai, Ken Goldberg. ACM International Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). Atlanta, GA. April 2010.
• Book: A Spatial Model for Collaborative Filtering of Comments in an Online Discussion Forum. Ephrat Bitton. Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Recommender systems - Rec Sys '09. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 2009. 393. 10.1145/1639714.1639797. 9781605584355. 17631067. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1639797.

References

1. Web site: Opinion Space . 2010-11-21 . 2010-06-29 . https://web.archive.org/web/20100629162931/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/ . live . Berkeley Center for New Media.
2. Web site: Unknown . 2013-07-27 . 2013-09-14 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130914022812/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/occupy . dead .
3. Web site: Unknown . 2013-07-27 . 2013-05-09 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130509222533/http://opinion.berkeley.edu/afron . dead .
4. Web site: Welcome to Opinion Space 2.0 . 2013-07-27 . 2013-05-09 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130509234701/http://opinion-labs.berkeley.edu/ . live .
5. Web site: Department of State Launches New Tool to Foster Online Open Dialogue March 15, 2010 . November 21, 2010 . November 20, 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101120195205/http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/03/138326.htm . live .

External links

• Opinion Space
• Research project page at EECS, UC Berkeley
• general information about the project from UC Berkeley