Join the new world

Do you have an opinion about the current government? Or maybe you would like a chance to win some gold? Perhaps both? If so, I invite you to take a few minutes to participate in my independent monthly national performance survey.

Anyone who considers themselves to be an active part of the eIrish community is welcome to take the survey. However only current Irish citizens are allowed to win gold (details below).






CONTENT

This survey will give you the opportunity to evaluate the recent performance of:

1) Ireland as a whole
2) The CP
3) All head ministers
4) Congress

In addition to rating government officials, each month I also like to include a unique and fun bonus section. This month you will have the opportunity to rate the performance of your own political party.




GOLD PRIZES!

As always, in order to encourage maximum participation I am offering the chance to win gold prizes to those who complete this survey. Although former citizens who consider themselves to be an active part of the eIrish community are welcome to take the poll, only current Irish citizens are eligible to be entered into the raffle. This month, we are giving away a total of 45 gold!

10 randomly-chosen people: 2 gold each.
5 people randomly-chosen people: 5 gold each.



Fun fact: After the current survey, we will have given away a total of 136 gold to the citizens of Ireland since this survey was first published in May 2013! All full record of past prize winners and sponsors is available here.

Fine print: Winners are randomly chosen by assigning each participant a number based on the order they took the survey and then generating random numbers within that range using the random number generator at www.random.org. All winners are disclosed in the analysis.




SPONSORS:

A very special thanks goes out to those who donated gold to help sponsor this month's survey. Donations this month were again at an all-time high, which, along with my own contribution, allowed us to raise our prize totals to an all-time high of 45 gold (versus 36 gold last month and 20 gold the month before).

James Keiller: 10 gold donation


Anthony Colby: 10 gold donation


Mary Robinson: 3 gold donation


Endritt Zekka: 3 gold donation


Danilo Garcia: 2 gold donation


Winston Hope Smith: 2 gold donation


Cry of the Banshee: 1 gold donation



Thank you all!

If you wish to help sponsor the November survey, please send me a PM! Because I do not accept government funding for obvious reasons, the prize money for each month (and thus the success of this survey) is completely dependent on private donations. The more prize money we can give away, the more people will take the survey and the more meaningful your own responses will be.

Thus far we have 0 gold collected for the November survey (I will try to update this number if/when more donations come in). All full record of past donations and prize winners is available here.





ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Anonymity:

In order to help prevent fraud and abuse, I require that all survey-takers provide a link to their eRepublik profile. Because I can personally see how you responded to specific questions if I really wanted to, this means that responses to this survey are not technically anonymous. I do, however, guarantee that such identifying information will never be seen by anybody but myself. I will never publicize or share anybody’s participation in this survey, much less their answers to specific questions. If I enlist someone’s help in analyzing data, they will only ever see data that has been purged of personally-identifying information. Thus, it is my hope that survey-takers feel comfortable in the knowledge that they will never be harassed regarding their participation in this survey, and that their answers will never be used against them politically.





Survey program:

Rather than using a simple Google form, this survey makes use of a more professional-quality survey program called Qualtrics. The advantages of this program are a more flexible user interface, better analytics, and, most importantly, better security and fraud prevention (see below). More information about the program can be found here.





Fraud Prevention

One important security feature of this program is that it does not allow anyone (including myself) to alter data that has already been collected. The only way to alter existing data is to delete or filter-out someone’s entire response set. However, because I now require people to provide a unique personal identification number (PIN) along with their profile links, survey-takers can be 100% certain that their responses were counted in full in any report by the software in which they can verify the presence of their PIN.

Participants can also be reasonably certain that results of these surveys are not influenced in other ways, such as adding fraudulent responses on top of legitimate data. The detection of multi votes can never be 100% accurate, but the vast majority of multi attempts can be detected using the fraud prevention tools that are imbedded within this software along with and a little common sense. For starters, the program collects metadata on things like IP addresses, screen resolution, and browser/flash/OS versions that I can (and do) check to make sure people aren’t taking this survey more than one time from the same computer. I also check to make sure that no two answer sets are suspiciously similar to one another, especially if one survey has been started within a minute or two of the other survey being finished. Profile links that are collected are thoroughly checked for suspicious properties, such as the use of duplicate profile links or profile links of dead citizens. Finally, verification checks are made via PM for a randomly-selected handful of profile links to ensure that people who took the survey actually are who they say they are. In the future I would also like to start cross-checking profile links with names of suspected Irish multi-accounts. If you have such a list, or know where to find one, please let me know ASAP. However, even without such a list, the tools and procedures outlined above already give me a significant degree of confidence in the validity of my data. If multi abuse exists at all it is extremely rare, and its final effect on results is negligible.


Oversight

Despite the professional-grade software with all of its bells and whistles, the validity of this survey is ultimately dependent on how much readers personally trust me to actually do what I say I am doing. However, this does not necessarily have to be the case. If any ambitious citizens from other parties/groups wish to volunteer to oversee the response verification process, I would WELCOME the help. Such a person would have full access to all of the data (including identifying information) at every stage of collection and analysis, provided we were up-front with survey-takers about who it will be BEFORE they actually take the survey. Not only would this increase the perceived validity of the survey, but it would make my own job easier!

If you wish to volunteer for this position for future surveys, I encourage you to send me a PM. Please note, however, that such arrangements must be made BEFORE the 20th of each month when the survey announcement goes live, so that potential survey-takers know exactly whose eyes might be looking over their answers. Thus, the current survey is no longer eligible for such oversight as nobody responded to my requests for help prior to the release of this survey. Also, anyone who wants to help oversee the results must promise in writing not to confront survey-takers about their participation in any way (even casually) or share or discuss any private data with anyone except myself or others who are helping with oversight.




Thank you for in advance for taking this survey!

Regards,
-Stilpo





PLEASE DO WHAT YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT ABOUT THIS SURVEY! Just taking the survey is only the first step! The more you shout and share with your friends, the more people will take this survey and the more meaningful the results will be!


LIST OF PREVIOUS SURVEY RESULTS:

[September 2013] National Performance Poll #5
[September 2013] July bonus section results
[September 2013] August bonus section results
[August 2013] National Performance Poll #4
[July 2013] National Performance Poll #3
[June 2013] National Performance Poll #2
[May 2013] National Performance Poll #1

[Nov 2012] Saoirse party performance survey
[Nov 2012] Government roles and responsibilities Survey
[Oct 2012] Policy opinion survey
[Oct 2012] Desirable traits for congress members