Update:

Unfortunately, due to a bug (shit happens), your entered nationalities weren’t saved in the database—only your answers to the questions. We’d really appreciate it if you could go through the questionnaire again. Don’t worry—you still remember your answers, so it should be quick. Sorry & thank you!

The Idea

A month or two ago, I had this idea:

Build a website with a survey where people from all over the world answer questions describing life-threatening situations, with multiple-choice responses. The goal was simple: to show that everyone would behave in ways similar to the refugees currently fleeing war-torn countries.

The twist: After answering 10 questions, you’re shown 10 question-answer pairs from another participant and asked to guess their nationality (or corresponding continent).

I pitched the idea to Y., thinking we could build it together :-) He loved the idea, and we brainstormed the best way to bring it to life.

In essence, our goal was to demonstrate that it’s basically impossible to deduce someone’s nationality from their answers, and to show that people from different countries tend to share similar opinions on life-and-death situations.

To make this even clearer, we visualize the percentage of correctly and incorrectly guessed nationalities (by continent) in a chart:

Open Borders

Since we plan to launch more projects like this, we quickly dubbed ourselves “Open Borders.” Under this name, we’ll release other projects in the future:

Design Phase

The idea was fairly clear, so we started sketching some scenarios and answer options on a Riseup pad. On the same day, we debated which system to use and where to host it. Yannic suggested Limesurvey on his server. Done and done—we installed it, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right tool. Limesurvey is built for traditional surveys, and we wanted to describe situations in detail to evoke empathy before asking questions—something Limesurvey couldn’t handle.

So, over the next few days, I decided to build it myself in Ruby on Rails and created a repository on GitHub. After a few days of coding, we had a first local version, which we tested and really liked. Due to time constraints, I continued development a few weeks later and soon had a version ready to go live.

Our biggest challenge: we are not

  • Writers
  • Designers
  • Psychologists

We had to curb our perfectionism, and admittedly some situation descriptions, questions, and answers could have been phrased better. Still, we decided to release a first version quickly (especially since the refugee topic was so hot at the time) and invite people to participate on the website.

Ruby on Rails App

Ruby on Rails is based on the MVC pattern, which made it easy to model the units in our app. The app consists of these models:

  • User
  • Situation
  • Question
  • Answer (UniversalAnswer)
  • Nationality
  • Continent
  • Survey

Here’s how they relate (diagram generated from modes.dot using the Ruby gem railroady):

UML Diagram of RoR models generated with railroady

We used Twitter Bootstrap for templates, so the app already looks decent. For simplicity, we used SQLite for the database and Highcharts to visualize the distribution of correctly guessed nationalities. At the start of the survey, we tried to create a bit of emotion in the style of “The Stanley Parable” with a narrator named “Line.” Since we’re not professional writers, it’s debatable whether it really worked out.

We’re looking for support!

Yannic set up the app on his server and started it—error included. After a few days of ignoring it, we finally found the ridiculous bug (wrong IDs in seed.rb) and the site went live.

Self-Promotion

We shared the project on Twitter and Facebook. The feedback was immediate and positive:

Still, hardly anyone has voted so far. Unfortunately, the success of our project depends on having enough participants. So here’s a more detailed write-up, hoping some of you find our idea cool, join the project, or help spread the word.

Here’s the call from the project website again:

Links: http://tolerance.cwiwie.org or http://tolerance.yhaupenthal.org (soon, thanks to Let’s Encrypt, with SSL certificates too)

Thanks! :-)