Steps to Create a New Survey Topic

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1. Determine Purpose of Topic

Before you start a topic, be sure you are clear on the purpose of the topic. Your purpose may be simply to find out what a crowd thinks on a particular issue, or the purpose may be to come up with expert consensus predictions. The purpose may be to quantitatively determine who the best experts are in a field, to make an important decision in a large organization, or to prioritize a set of tasks to be done.

You may also simply want a dynamic petition that can constantly improve as more people sign, including room for anyone to create competing camps, should such differing points of view exist. Regardless, the purpose and goals of the survey topic should be clearly stated in the agreement camp of the new topic.

You may want to first write down the intended topic name and the initial agreement statement so that you can simply cut and paste the values into the appropriate form fields as you go through these steps.

2. Create New Topic

To start a new survey topic, select the "Create New Topic" link on the side bar. This will take you to a form with several required fields, such as “Name” and “Title.”

One of the options to select will be the topic “name space.” Normally this will be left to the default general value, as most topics go in the general name space, but if you want to create something other than a default namespace topic, such as create a practice topic in the "/sandbox/" namespace, the desired namespace should be indicated. Once all the attributes are set appropriately, you can select the "Create Topic" button on this form page. Once it is submitted, the topic will be created, and you will be added as the first supporter. Supporting the agreement camp is not taking any position on any of the possible POV camps that may be developed. This is merely showing your support of the importance of the survey topic itself. This makes the new topic show up on the front page and gives you control over any proposed changes anyone may make to the topic attributes. It is always possible to move your support to other camps at any time as things continue develop.

3. Create the Agreement Statement

The purpose of the statement is added by selecting the "Add Camp Statement" link. If the camp name is sufficient, a root camp agreement statement is not always necessary.

4. Solicit Participation in the Survey Topic

Once the topic is set up and supported, it will show up on the main Canonizer.com page for all to participate. At this point, turn the filter back on by setting it to a filter less than value. You can also solicit participation to target audiences by sending the topic URL to people.