New feature: Anonymous polling
Wooof two updates in one day!
We've also recently deployed a beta feature called 'anonymous voting'... another one of our more-oft-requested features. There's been some rich discussions about the feasibility and utility of this feature going on here and here
We've decided to implement this, and have deployed it to a few expressly interested groups. It could be something which is available as an option to anyone, but I'd like to get a little closed beta feedback about it first. If Anonymous polling is turned on for your group, simply select the option when creating a poll:
And anyone who's not you who votes in the poll will have their identity
hidden, although their vote and reasoning will still be visible.
(Note that at present anonymous polls remain anonymous even after voting has closed. This is one of the things I am open to hearing feedback about :) )
If you'd be interested in trying out anonymous polling in your group, shoot an email to contact@loomio.org and we'll turn it on for you. Thanks for your help!
I've just turned this on as an option for all groups, because we've had quite a bit of interest in the feature. Let me know if there are any issues :)
Bug: I created an anonymized poll in a group and asked it to notify me when people respond to it. While the responses are anonymous in the poll itself, my notifications still say who responded each time someone does, which could make it easy to infer who answered what.
Perhaps change the notifications to "a group member responded" for such situations?
Thanks for the report; this should now be fixed (for future notifications :) ).
Thanks, @gdpelican!
One other thing that would be useful would be to have the results of an anonymous poll not be revealed until the poll closes. In particular, I'm about to run a board election with 6 candidates for 5 slots, and being able to see the results seems like it could create an incentive to hold off voting until folks have seen how others vote.
I would also be interested in this feature, for comparable reasons.
I think this is an easy addition and I'm going to take a crack at it today.
Hey! I've been trying out this feature and it's really cool. I'm using it for a poll for which a group member expressed interest in being anonymous.
One note: as the vote admin, it looks like I am able to revert the vote type from anonymous to not anonymous after a bunch of folks have voted, thus removing their anonymity! This seems kind of tricky / unsafe to me. I wonder what you think. Maybe anonymous-mode should not be changeable after a poll is created?
Yes, my best advice for this at the moment is 'Don't do that'. :)
In the future we'll be taking a good hard look at 'draft mode' for polls, which will give a grace period for editing options and context around a decision, and then allowing you to explicitly open it for voting (at which point some options, like adding additional polling options or whether the poll is anonymous or not, will be set, and unable to change)
Alright, I've added the option to reveal voters after the poll has closed. Let me know how that works for you?
The thing I'd like to see is to keep votes secret until the polls close, while keeping voters anonymized permanently.
Ah, I misinterpreted your use of the word 'results' in your previous post.
This feature is a little bit further away, given that we need to be very careful to not 'leak' stance information via live update, emails, notifications, etc, but I'll put it on the list. We'll keep the existing functionality as well, given that it's been requested a few times in the past.
Really really excited to see this, it will make some things quite a bit better for us using Loomio :)
Just had another customer ask for 'votes' to be revealed after close. Just recording it here.
I'm confused. How an individual voted? Or the results?
I mean to say.. that during the poll we hide all vote information except the total count of votes so far. When the poll closes we reveal the votes but not the voters.
Aweso
Hey there! I created an anonymous vote, and I noticed that the voting UI hinted to me that "votes would remain anonymous until the poll was over" even though I had not checked the "Reveal voters after close" box. Seems like a bug? Shouldn't it say something like "votes will remain anonymous forever, unless the vote-maker changes the settings halfway through"?
One question about this; is there a way for admins to see who voted in an anonymous vote? We're doing a referendum in a group, and are discussing whether to anonymize the vote, but would like to know who voted in it as a gauge of who's active in the group and who might need additional outreach.
not currently. I'll add it to the design notes for the next revision. I suggest you ask people to comment (or make a parallel check poll) once they have voted.
Looks like good initial implementation.
Post vote de-anonnymizing is great option but i guess not essential.
Keep up the good work!