Urtak Blog

The year has started strong for Urtak! We’ve seen tremendous usage from Andrew Sullivan, the great political blogger, and from 37signals, the great entrepreneurs. In each case, hundreds of thousands of responses were collected in a matter of hours.

But when it comes to engagement, it is hard to top The Blaze. The Blaze used Urtak to find out what their audience thinks about guns and gun rights and the results are astonishing. In just one day, more than 140,000 people have participated, asking 1500 questions and answering more than 4.2 million times! That means that the average user has answered 30 questions, and that Urtak has been collecting about 50 responses per second. For audience engagement and insights, Urtak is quite simply the best tool on the market.

The Blaze readers are about as gun-loving as you can get. Just click the following questions to see the results.

Do you own a gun?
Is open carry for permitted law-abiding citizens a good idea?
Do you own a weapon that would be considered an “assault rifle?”

The full results are here. Explore to your heart’s content.

But what does 4+ million responses in a day really mean? It means that a massive, open, democratic, and constructive exchange of opinions online is possible. Compare the Blaze results to the 4+ million comments under Gangnam Style. Which is easier to make sense of?

It means that our team, ably led by Aaron Gibralter, has build a rock-solid piece of technology. Standing up to the punishment of tens of thousands of concurrent users is not easy, even for expert teams.

And it shows that we are well on our way to our goal of quantifying the whole world’s opinions. The information that was created over the last day used to exist only as thoughts in people’s minds – now it’s been turned into hard data. In five years, at anytime you wish to learn what any group of people in the world thinks about anything at all, you will turn to Urtak.

Ask questions. Get answers.

To be born Canadian is to be born fortunate. But as we know from Balzac, the secret of a great fortune is a forgotten crime. And without the appropriation of the land by trickery, treachery, and main force, there would be no Canada.

Less than one in twenty Canadians claim descent from First Nations. Compared to citizens of European origin, these Canadians earn less, die younger, are incarcerated more, and are raped more often. This is just a sample of what would be a much more miserable litany.

In the last two months, the emergence of a First Nations-led protest movement called Idle No More has made headlines around the world. Originally a protest against a new law proposed by the federal government (Bill C-345), the movement has swelled on the tide of long-standing grievance.

For some Canadians, facing the reality of a history of oppression is deeply troubling and can lead to a nasty habit of victim-blaming. Online, this has manifested itself in the flame wars and social media ugliness that we have come to expect from the digital realm. The Ottawa Citizen reports that many comments sections have even had to be shut down. This is very sad, because more conversation, discussion, and debate is certainly what Canada needs.

It’s hard to know what Canadians think about the question of First Nations inequality, but on a website belonging to the CBC, the public broadcaster, we at least have a source of new questions and hard data – Urtak.

We’ve already posted some results from the Urtak created for the 8th Fire documentary series. But in this case, we’ll look at the difference in attitudes between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians. More than 2000 people participated in the Urtak with their questions and answers, and just under half of them self-identify as aboriginal.

Here are just a few interesting results:

When asked “Should aboriginals have their own country?” more than twice as many aboriginals said yes. Slightly more aboriginals than non-aboriginals thought that more aboriginal control over their own land would prevent environmental abuses. And significantly more aboriginals thought that First Nations language education should be mandatory in school.

When it came to the issue of privatization of reserve land, the idea was equally opposed by a two-thirds majority of both aboriginals and non-aboriginals.

Interestingly enough, non-aboriginals were more likely to think that non-white children can be successfully raised by a white family, that reservations should be abolished and restructured, and that the treaty commitments made by the Canadian government to the various First Nations will one day be honored.

These discrepancies clearly indicate that more discussion and debate are required if all Canadians are to enjoy equal citizenship. The results also show that it is indeed possible for more than two thousand people to engage online with a controversial topic without a single insult being exchanged. We thank all who participated, and the CBC for hosting the conversation.

Ask questions. Get answers. Think for yourself.

Last month, I was invited to give a seminar at the EdLab of Teachers College, Columbia University. An excellent video was produced from the talk, which you can find below. I explained some ofthe ideas and motivations that caused Urtak to be created and gave an overview of what has been accomplished to date. If you are interested in understanding what makes Urtak tick…watch and learn!

Keeping up with the growing Urtak ecosystem…

Urtak changing the world already?
In 2009, the UN launched CensusInfo, a unique software tool to help countries disseminate census data on the web. The UN’s 2010 World Population and Housing Programme seeks to provide information on how to improve census taking so governments can make effective development decisions. Recently, they used Urtak to collect feedback on CensusInfo.

Mashable knows Urtak!
During the iPhone 5 pre-launch madness they asked their audience what they would give to be first in line. The engagement results were very clear: Urtak 8,567 responses – Comments 24. And apparently more people were willing to give up a night of sleep instead of Google Maps.

Is Obama winning?
Does Romney still have a chance? With the U.S. presidential race heading into the final month of the election, American Conversation co-hosts Dan Patterson and Marc Lizoain discussed the current state of the campaign, their take on opinion polls and whether we should trust them.

Democracy in Burma
Aung San Suu Kyi, chairperson of the National League for Democracy in Burma, spoke at the World Leadership Forum at Columbia University. The Columbia Spectator asked their readers questions about the event and gauged the approval of their President Lee Bollinger who introduced Aung San Suu Kyi. 90% who took this poll approve of his performance as president!

55 Questions – 55,000 Responses
Mobile platform strategist Peter Paul-Koch, of Quirksmode.org, did a survey on JavaScript libraries. 55 questions were asked, 55,001 responses came in.

Tuition Hikes
Student unions in Quebec went on strike and won a major battle against their local government over tuition hikes. With rising student debt becoming more pertinent every day, Urtak Founder Marc Lizoain took to Opinion.is to start a conversation about whether a university education should be universal.

Yesterday, we released a shiny new version of our API documentation at developer.urtak.com. It features an apigee console that allows developers to play around with our API on our sandbox server, api-sandbox.urtak.com. Please note that the sandbox server is just for testing our API and is isolated from the urtak.com database. Additionally, for convenience, we’ve disabled signature checking on the sandbox server.

If you have any questions or come across any problems, please don’t hesitate to send us an email at moc.katrunull@pleh.