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Informed Voter
One of our strengths at HungerMaps is information analysis. What better way then to exemplify one of our strengths than to show you how I decided to be an informed voter. 
After reading every N2Y2 project proposal in detail, I created a chart to illustrate my thoughts. Based on the Gartner Research Magic Quadrant, the chart above groups the proposals into four groups according to an assessment of their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Coordinates are based on a weighted syntactic analysis of summaries I wrote for each project.
To further inform my vote, I thought about the potential of this conference:
- A good thing this conference can do is help niche players and challengers become more innovative
- A better thing this conference can do is recognize innovations from existing leaders
- The best thing this conference can do is help a visionary become a leader
Now that I've done my homework, it's time to cast my ballot.
- Eamon, HungerMaps.org
p.s.: see the chart bigger here.
- eamonjohnson's blog
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- More to add
7 hours 27 min ago - Sounds pretty interesting and
2 days 4 hours ago - This project could be a real
2 days 18 hours ago
Curious
michael gibbons buttons of hope
Pretty cool approach -- So where did buttons of hope place on that axis? afraid i am right there in that niche/challenger swarm of mosquitoes??
Playing in a niche
Yes, Buttons of Hope landed squarely in the Niche Palyer category. This indicates great potential to benefit from increased resources and opportunities in increasing the scope of the project.
One of the problems with the Magic Quadrant in this situation is it does not express potential or impact. There is nothing wrong with being a niche player as long as your niche continues to exist.
I wonder
Gee... I wonder why according to that image hungermaps is the most visionary project and how you measured the ability to execute just by reading the proposals.
Interpreting the data
Thanks for the feeback. The chart does reflect an evaluation of projects according to my values, and it is no surprise that I think highly of project to which I devote myself. Of course you are free to disregard any evaluation you disagree with. What do you think of the other 150 evaluations?
As for ability to execute, I rated the projects on the following:
What are we supposed to use?
How was he supposed to measure "ability to execute," if not with the proposals? I don't know about you, but I also want to support folks who have an "ability to execute."
How Visionary
I especially like how you can hardly read anything.
Visualizing the data
Thanks for the feedback. As a graphic artist, what would you suggest for this kind of data presentation? A number and key approach would have been better for interpreting the whole data set, but the chart as is was informative to me.
Who needs the graphic?
The underlying data (table) would be much more useful than this unreadable chart. To get overall rankings, you could have just ranked along each axis and averaged the ranks (or used Z's if you insist). To the extent I care about your analysis, I care what you thought of each project, especially the ones at the top and the particular ones I'm most interested in; and I care about your reasoning in ranking along both these axes, which is also missing. Relative to those things, I get very little value added from seeing this scatter. There are times when graphic representations help you see new things in a data set; this doesn't seem like one of those times.
Re: Who needs the Graphic?
Holden, thanks for the feedback (and your "Frustrations" post, which I really, really appreciated).
I think folks might have missed the point of Eamon's graph - he wasn't trying to tell you who to vote for, he was trying to tell you how he decided to vote. The image was just an illustration of his analytic process, which he used only for his own decisions.
Whether you could read it was beside his point, which was that people needed to do some homework before voting, and that a magic quadrant analysis based on scope of vision and ability to execute was a useful way to think about the problem. Why would you want his underlying dataset, which was so obviously based on just his opinions, unless you wanted to challenge his findings?
Eamon, feel free to chime in if I'm off-base here.