Andrew Whitacre recently wrote on the MIT Center for Future Civic Media blog about how the Knight Foundation recently ran a competition where they distributed several thousand dollars of prize money to new projects. Andrew mentions in that post that the decision on where the money would go was made by all the attendees at the conference  using Selectricity.

What Andrew doesn’t mention is that we put into action a new mode for Selectricity that had been requested by quite a number of users. That new mode is a “kiosk mode” which basically means that it provides an interface to Selectricity more like a voting machine. At the conference, 10 computers were set up as voting machines and the entire conference took turns using these kiosks to vote like they would in a “real” election.

The election went smoothly but some feedback is being addressed from the experiment. Once that is done, kiosk mode will go live with a new version of Selectricity that includes a whole bunch of new features and addresses dozens of bugs and other issues reported by users.

Hold tight and keep your eyes on this space. We’ll post a blog post here as soon as a the release is live — almost certainly in the next couple weeks.

Last September, Selectricity was launched with the ability to create QuickVotes and to use Selectricity Anywhere. Since September, users have created thousands of QuickVotes on a variety of things — from deciding which movie to watch to what to name a pet! It’s also being put to use to select tons of meeting times — something we didn’t anticipate.

One of the most important features Selectricity will be launching soon is what we’re currently calling “full election” functionality. Details will follow but the basic idea is that this feature will provide a way to use Selectricity for more structured, traditional, organizational-style decision-making. QuickVotes are simple and unstructured — like polls. Full elections are more like something you’d use to elect the leader of an institution.

As part of preparing for this, we’ve successfully run through our first set of real full elections! The test group was the national non-profit organization Students for Free Culture and they used Selectricity to elect their board of directors.

Several months ago, SFC amended their bylaws to note that board members would be elected with a preferential election method. Selectricity made doing that easy and SFC graciously agreed to be guinea pigs for the software in the process.

That election finished last week successfully! There were 13 candidates and 16 voters so first-place votes were split up among the candidates. As a result, the group would have been very poorly served by a traditional plurality election that gave each voter only one vote. No SFC candidate got more than four votes and five people were tied for fifth place!

Notably, the first place winner in plurality didn’t even make into the top five using the preferential Schulze/Condorcet method that decided the election. While the candidate was ranked first more than any other candidate, he was very polarizing and was ranked near-last on most of the other ballots. The first place winner using Schulze/Condorcet (and most of the other methods) had only two first place votes but was in the top 3 or 4 in almost every ballot. It ended up being a real example of the power of preferential elections.

SFC has decided to publish the full details of their election results so you can check them out for yourself.

In the next couple weeks, we’ll be incorporating feedback from the SFC voters and administrators. After that, we’ll be opening the feature up to the public and you’ll be able to try it yourself. If you’d like to be notified when the feature goes life, send a quick email to team@selectricity.org and we’ll keep you in the loop.

The site is live today with a brand new design by Courtland Allen with help from Alyssa Wright, and a whole bunch of improved results visualizations by Justin Sharps. There’s a huge amount of other work that’s been made to the site as well. Not all of it is ready to be launched today but we’ll be showing off new features in the next few weeks and months.

If you are interested in Selectricity, in hearing about our new features, or in tracking new features, please go ahead and subscribe to this blog which will, moving forward, be the best way to stay up to date.

Congratulations to John, Justin, and Courtland who put in long hours over the last few months to make this come together. Your work definitely shows!