Selectricity

Work on Selectricity continues and there are a bunch of new features which have been polished and tested for release soon. Here’s a pointer to a story that highlights one cool new feature in the pipeline.

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.