The Photocracy web application was written in Ruby on Rails (2.3.x) using HAML and SASS for templating and JQuery for JavaScript.  It was a multilingual site (Chinese, English, Japanese, and Spanish) and relied on geolocation to guess and set the language.  Photo uploads where handled by the attachment_fu plug-in and integrated with the Flickr API.  Photo pairs were requested and loaded from the Pairwise API using XML.  The application recorded comprehensive tracking statics of all user movement.  Back-end analysis used the spawn plug-in to create charts of these tracking statistics with the gnu_plotter plug-in.

Below is a screen shot of the original photocracy front page.  The front page had an animated progress bar (shown in unfilled grey, which would become blue) and kept track of cached prompts so the user would not experience any latency between votes.

Project Description: Photocracy is a research project to develop a new form of social data collection that combines the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to “bubble up” from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups.

Above is a screen shot of the photo listing page. The source code for my version of Pairwise is here.  The Photocracy project has changed and now has a new developer, it is available here.