Sealed Bidding
We use this for auctions but it's more general.
You can use it to get responses from a group of people without them influencing each other.
Name the participants and point everyone at the URL and Bob’s your uncle.
Specifically, after everyone has responded aka bid, this page reveals everyone’s bids.
You could use it to get independent estimates of how long a project will take.
Or just use it to play Schelling’s coordination game. [1]
You’re free to replace your bid by just submitting again, which is allowed until the bids are revealed.
When all the bids are in, the “reveal” button becomes clickable and the final revelation happens when someone clicks it.
Thanks to Bethany Soule and Christopher Moravec for making predecessors of this tool.
Footnotes
[1]
Apparently this isn’t a very googlable thing.
It’s where someone names a category like “books” or “colors” or “famous historical figures” or “places” or “integers” or any crazy set you can imagine, and then everyone writes down the most
focal
element of the category.
I.e., you try to find a Schelling point.
You get a point (other kind of point) for each other person who wrote down the same thing as you.
It’s fun.