Lino Polly, yet another sailboat

Monday, May 16, 2022

Today I answered to an online poll made by a workgroup “Empirische Politikwissenschaft” led by Dr. Jan Karem Höhne at the Political Sciences faculty of the Duisburg-Essen university.

While answering it, I thought “Hey, this is something we could easily do with Lino Polly”. I remembered Lino Polly and had a look at it. I actually like it very much. But:

  • The documentation about Lino Polly is incomplete and chaotic.

  • Currently the Polly online demo doesn’t even work

  • getlino doesn’t even know Polly.

  • The project should get its own repository and documentation.

  • The name “Polly” is suboptimal, I’d rather suggest Lino Chiedo (“ti chiedo” in Italian means “I ask you”)

  • There is still a disturbing bug under the React front end: In Responses of Participant feedback » Robin Rood’s response to Participant feedback when you select an answer, the screen doesn’t update automatically.

And then: does it make sense to work on Polly? I started to wonder: Who develops such software? How much does the university pay for it? Are they satisfied with the solution? Who pays the university? Who pays Dr. Höhne for doing this?

The mentioned online poll was implemented on Unipark, a project that is operated by Tivian XI GmbH, who engages over 300 employees in 19 countries and claims to be European market leader for Enterprise Feedback Management solutions. Unipark also says that it is “QuestBack’s academic program”. QuestBack is another private corporation.

One thing is clear: Lino Polly is once again a sailing boat challenging ocean liners.