This week’s activity asks for a compilation of individuals and groups involved in and association with Wikileaks and to chart out their relationship using Gliffy, which is a piece of online software that allows you to create various diagrams and flowcharts. Below is my list of key individuals and groups associated with Wikileaks.
Wikileaks
Non-profit organization that publishes secret and classified documents.
Jacob Appelbaum
Volunteer for Wikileaks and represented the organization at the 2010 Hope Conference. His Twitter account was subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Rop Gonggrijp
A dutch hacker that volunteers for Wikileaks and founder of Internet Service Provider XS4ALL. His Twitter account was subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Birgitta Jonsdottir
A former volunteer who had her Twitter account subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Twitter
A social networking website that allows users to post short status updates. Twitter decided to not give the U.S. government the information that was subpoenaed.
Julian Assange
States he is the Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, yet his actual role in the organization is largely unknown.
Bradley Manning
A U.S. Army soldier who alledgly leaked classified information including the U.S. Diplomatic Cables to Wikileaks. Manning is currently being held in a U.S. high-security prison.
Barack Obama
Current President of the United States, opposed to Wikileaks and all of its operations.
Daniel Ellsberg
A former U.S. military analyst who released secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers. Has referred to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as ‘heros’.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Former spokesperson for Wikileaks. Deflected the organization and started OpenLeaks. He as previously involved with the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker group.
Rudolf Elmer
A former Swiss banker who passed on confidential documents to Wikileaks that detail activities of bank Julius Bar and their involvement in an alleged tax evasion scheme.
TIME Magazine
A popular news magazine which saw its readers vote Julian Assange as TIME’s Person of the Year for 2010. TIME decided to select Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as the Person of the Year instead.
Facebook
A social networking website that allows individuals to create personal profiles and share information. Wikileaks cablegate documents where/are shared by individuals using the website.
Joe Liberman
A U.S. Senator who put pressure on Amazon.com to stop providing infrastructure and web services to Wikileaks.
The U.S. Government
Strongly opposed to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Gliffy was actually pretty intuitive and easy to use. Some of the tools can get a little cumbersome and the site seems to bog down when you have a lot of objects on your flowchart. Normally when online tools are free to use, you expect there to be limited functionality or advertisements popping up all over the place. However, this wasn’t the case with Gliffy, although I found the zoom and move tools to be a bit clunky and not as precise as something like Photoshop, for example. Exporting the org chart was very easy, although I feel Gliffy lacked exporting options, and I had to do some cropping with Apple’s Preview to get rid of the white space that Gliffy didn’t remove. Overall I thought Gliffy was great for a free tool, and I can see it being useful for large organizations or for project planning. My org chart is embedded below.
I’m a bit unfamiliar with creating surveys online – but I did create a rather large online survey last summer that was sent to 2000+ employees. I used SurveyMonkey as the company I was working for had a corporate account with the website, and the survey itself was actually very easy to create and distribute.
I began looking for a different tool to use for this week’s activity. I started by searching for ‘online survey tools’ using Google. I came across several listings of different tools – which can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
It was immediately apparent after searching that there is an abundant amount of survey tools out there. What was great about some of the lists I found was that they ranked the survey tools from good to bad. A few things that seem to make up a good online survey tool include its ability to be integrated with other websites or tools, ability to customize the look and design of the survey (something very important for surveys that need to replicate a brand), how easy it is to use, the cost associated with using the tool, how collected data is stored, organized and shared, and finally, if the data can be exported to another format, such as into a downloadable spreadsheet or PDF file.
The three tools I decided to look into included QuestionPro, SurveyGizmo, and Survey Crafter.
QuestionPro
This tool comes in both a free and paid version, and has over twenty pre-built themes that the user can chose from. The tool sorts questions by ‘standard’ and ‘advanced’ – with advanced giving you more options to customize your question. The tool can be connected with Facebook if you wanted to place your survey on a social network. You can also copy questions from another survey you have created with the tool. QuestionPro is also used by many large corporations such as Motorola, Microsoft, Honeywell, and ING, and seems to be one of the largest competitors to SurveyMonkey.
SurveyGizmo
This tool has a nice, clean interface and allows for customizable colours and formats like QuestionPro. Standard answers such as Yes/No and a rating scale are built into the tool which minimizes the amount of typing you’ll need to do. SurveyGizmo has a free version, but it seems to be very limited in what you can do. The tool can be purchased in four different packages, ranging from $19 per month to $7,888 per year.
Survey Crafter
Survey Crafter also allows for customizable surveys, but costs $345 for a student-licensed copy. Seems rather expensive. Their website is also terrible and looks very unprofessional. However, the tool can be used with many different languages, has a ‘built-in interviewer’ which can enter new data or modify existing responses, and can also generate many tables and charts, cross tabulations, correlation matrices and statistics tables.
I wanted to try Survey Crafter for this activity to try out the ‘built-in interviewer’, but I’m definitely not willing to shell out the $345. I decided on using QuestionPro as they seemed to have the best free version, and I liked that the tool can easily be integrated with Facebook. I was also curious to see how QuestionPro handled surveys in relation to SurveyMonkey.
My 9-question survey can be found here.
Survey Feedback
I sent the survey out to eight people and received four returns. I didn’t really get any sort of reaction about the survey except for the respondents wondering why I was sending them a survey in the first place. I would have liked to create a longer survey, but the free version of QuestionPro only allowed for up to 9 different questions.
Using QuestionPro was definitely a little confusing at the beginning, and I struggled figuring out how to add questions and then edit them if I needed to. If I were to create another survey, I would definitely chose SurveyMonkey over QuestionPro, simply because it is easy to use and modify, and that the free version allows for more questions. Many pop-ups kept appearing while I was creating the survey which was very annoying. All in all, I wouldn’t use QuestionPro again.