Best Practices

If you need to conduct a survey using PolisOrbis you have two alternatives:

• run your own instance of PolisOrbis Service in your infrastructure
• use an existing managed services asking permission to the service provider

Even if PolisOrbis code is free, to conduct an on-line opinions’ survey always requires some resources:

• you must plan effort to setup, moderate, summarize and close the survey (depending from the survey characteristics)
• you must provide resources to publicize your survey
• if you opt to use a 3rd party service, you probably have to pay some service fees
• if you opt to deploy your PolisOrbis service you must pay your infrastructure and service operation costs, by your personnel and/or external technical consultants

You must also take into account that running an on-line service always implies some responsibilities

Using your own instance of PolisOrbis

Pros:

• attached to the identity service of your choice
• complete control on user access
• complete access to the internal DB
• great degree of UI customization
• optimized scalability support for big survey ( > 10000 users)
• you can expand the code with your own functionality for a better integration with your system
• no external services costs
• no license cost (Open source License)

Cons:

• you need your own hw & network infrastructure
• you must have good skills as a service provider and you must know cloud services, kubernetes, docker and Postgress
• no support on operation: you have to pay a consultant
• infrastructure requires a minimum capacity that can be oversized for just some small surveys ( < 1000 users): there are some fixed infrastructure cost you have to pay even if no surveys are done.

Using a 3rd party service

Pros:

• You do not have to manage technical infrastructure and concentrate only on survey contents
• Troubles in operations are managed by the service providers according defined SLA (service level agreement)
• cost are convenient for short term, low number of participants surveys because the fixed cost are shared.
• high availability

Cons:

• you relay on the Identity server chosen by the service provider
• yoy have only a limited control on user access (depending from the service configuration) complete access to the internal DB
• no UI customization
• operation fee

using PolisOrbis sandbox

The PolisOrbis sandbox service (https://demo.polisorbis.eu/) is free for all to test the latest version of the PolisOrbis service. See privacy policy and Term of Use

using PolisOrbis Copernicani Instance

The Copernicani PolisOrbis service can be used by Orbis pilots by:

• Using the Orbis identity provider under the responsibility of the Orbis Consortium (as soon ass it will be available).
• Signing a contract containing SLA and a waiver, releasing Copernicani from liability for the content of your survey. [Example document link TBD]
• Contributing to the service operation cost (details in Basecamp)

Responsibilities

Besides this running an on-line service requires some legal responsibilities:

• you must write and execute your policies to moderate/control user behavior inside your survey
• you must ensure that no sensitive data are shared inside the user generated comments

If you run your instance of PolisOrbis:

• you need to plan legal effort to write your Term of Services and Your Privacy policy

If you use a 3rd-party service:

• you will probably have to sign a waiver for the provider, releasing it from liability for the content of your survey.
• you will have to negotiate with the service provider a SLA and service costs
• you must agree with the service provider TOS and Privacy Policy

other best practices

For a detailed methods paper, see Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces.