Internet-based poll kicks off worldwide

The world’s largest Internet-based poll kicked off yesterday in 115 countries, including the Philippines in eight languages for four days, with questions ranging from the thought-provoking to the entertaining all focused on humanity’s beliefs, hopes, fears, similarities, and differences.

Planet Project uses technologies never combined before, engaging people online as well as those who are connected by the Internet. It will give Filipinos their first opportunity to share views and opinions and then instantly compare their responses with those of other nations, ages, and sex.

The project is part of 3Com Corp.’s vision to bring the world closer together by simple-to-use networking technologies, and will allow people worldwide to hold up a ‘digital mirror’ for a glimpse of the human condition.

The technologies required to make the Planet Project poll possible include those from some of the world‘s leading companies such as AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corp., Harris Interactive, Akami Technologies, BEA-Systems, Mercury Interactive, Macromedia, and Eucid.

In the Philippines, people, many of who are students and young professionals, trooped to participating Internet cafes, such as those of Netopia, Pacific Internet and KlikStation, where they not only got a chance to log on to the official web site for free and take part in the survey, but also took home souvenir items.

Students aged 13 to 20 worldwide logged on to http://students.planetproject.com to answer questions posed by the International Youth Panel, composed of 20 diverse students from several countries.

In the Philippines 3Com country sales manager Kenneth Palacios said they tapped local partners including Mapalad, a group of some 600 Filipinos who use Palma handheld computers, that will administer the poll for the ‘man-on-the-street’ mall shoppers, urban professionals, dinners, and even taxi and jeepney drivers.

The overall results of the survey will be made available a year from now for free for research purposes to interested educational, governmental, and non-governmental organizations worldwide 3Com gave assurances that the data will not be used for any direct marketing, advertising, or corporate sales purposes, with no e-mail ‘spam’ directed towards poll participants as well as banner ads.

Bruce Claflin, 3Com and chief operating officer, said yesterday from the project’s mission control in Santa Clara, California: "The poll is the biggest, fastest and most sophisticated survey of its kind ever attempted yet the contributions of our partners are ensuring that it will be easy for the world to take. It is a bold demonstration of how technology can be used to foster greater understanding across geographical, cultural, and economic barriers."

For instance, a battery of Harris Interactive programmers spent more than 20,000 hours, over several months to create the Web pages needed to run the poll in eight languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish). Harris is the global leader in online market research.

The poll consists of eight topical modules: religion, beliefs and fears, health and well being, sleep and dreams, self-image, marriage, dating and sex, parenting and education, law and order. There are 20 questions per poll topic. For instance, one question asks: ‘When you die, what do you think will most likely happen to you.’ Another asks: ‘Would you switch your race if you knew you could not change it back?’

In order to engage people online (www.planetproject.com) as well as those not connected by the Net, volunteer Plant Pollsters worldwide were equipped with handheld computers and transmitting devices to facilitate poll taking. After receiving the responses, the pollsters will transmit the data by connecting to networked PCs, handheld modems, mobile phones, and even satellite phone for the most remote areas such as the Amazon Rainforests (Uwa Indians), the Himalayan Mountains, Siberia and Puerto Williams in Chile.

All the information will then be fed back to the mission control and data center in California where 52 servers will be used to process the poll results around the clock.