Hogwash for October 2009

We here at FirePig have recently begun work on a new product: an online data collection and reporting tool for large scale collection efforts. About ten years ago (or, in Internet-speak, "back in the Paleolithic Era") I built such a system for my employer at the time. It had a fair number of neat features, and we'll be drawing on that experience as we move forward. However, the web has come a long way in the past decade, and we're convinced that we can use modern techniques to significantly improve the state of electronic data collection. We're not talking about simple polls or surveys with a handful of questions. While you could certainly use what we're building for those sorts of projects, there are plenty of existing tools that can handle that. We're talking more involved, complicated data collections - imagine a tool that could handle the Census long form, and you have a sense of what we're aiming for.

We're in the initial planning stages right now, and we'd like your help. Please share with us in the comment section your experiences with providing information on the web: the good, the bad and the ugly. We want to hear from everyone, no matter how web savvy you are. (In fact, the less savvy, the more useful your experiences will be.) If you have any suggestions for features, we'd love to hear those, too.