Forms lexicon

[ebwinters]

I think it could be beneficial to create a generic forms style lexicon that supports form creation with question types like short answer, multiple choice, and select many. Other properties could allow for anonymous forms, required fields, or closed forms that are only fillable through a generated link with a secret token.
The lexicon would also support form completion.

I think it would be useful to have form building apps supported on atproto and don't see an alternative to something like google forms built yet

Implemented by #26

[ngerakines]

Yeah, I could think of a few situations where that could play out in the ATmosphere.

1. Events. Having a way for event organizers to create optional simple inputs could be really compelling and useful. The first example that comes to mind is creating a picnic event and having a question/answer style input for "What food are you bringing?"

2. Polls. Using a building block question/answer lexicon could allow for surveys to be composed with single choice, multiple choice, and user-input responses.

[ebwinters]

Interesting use cases. I agree

I have a PR up now with a forms lexicon, also building an app view in parallel and can share designs if that. But want to iron out the lexicon first

[essential-randomness]

Ethan and I talked about this in private already, but I wanted to understand more broadly what people's vision for these very generic lexicons is. I have a couple questions to help us see more possible use cases for this:

1) Is the vision that a record is going to contain a field of type "form", or is there going to be a separate form entry record that events would link to? Is this going to be different for different usages?

Personally, I'm assuming that publishing a form record would be equivalent to saying "here's a generic form we make available and multiple events (or other applications) might reuse them if they apply to them", while within the record itself it would be specific to that event. It'd be interesting to think about use cases for both. I assume the ones @ngerakines brought up would all have the form data in the event itself.

2) What would a form lexicon enable vs e.g. having a link to a Google form? What I can think of is:

• Different applications can display the form directly in their UI (and we could provide a pre-made library to turn a lexicon into a UI)
• Different applications can react to new answers being posted in the form (via firehose)
• Different applications can see whether someone has responded to a specific form in the past and act accordingly

Anything I'm missing?

[ebwinters]

1. The vision is a form record that is independent of any other records to allow for maximum flexibility. I think gathering feedback from a group of people is applicable in many scenarios from standalone forms, to social media polls, to business feedback pop-ups.
   At its core, the data representing a social media poll is the same as some cloud provider asking "are you enjoying ____? Select a rating 1-10". These can all be represented in the same format in atproto, and users of all of these products can view their responses across products. A themed client library can be developed the be embedded across applications for easier integration, including in Bluesky.

Having forms/responses as separate entities allows for uses like

• I create a standalone form for something completely random like a T shirt order, and send it to some friends to fill out
• I create a standalone form relating to something that exists on the protocol, like an event, and handle it in the app view or send it out separately
• Lexicons such as events can integrate forms or references to forms into their schema

Different applications can display the form directly in their UI

is the biggest one. Collecting user feedback is a fairly common use case on the internet. Right now, Twitter, google, facebook, Groupme and a lot more have custom ways of creating and storing polls, even though the data largely looks the same. Azure, AWS, GCP, and more all have different collection mechanisms to ask you to rate their product 1-10. To build apps on atproto from social medias to event RSVP systems to a fandom board, developers will need a model for collecting user feedback to questions/polls on the protocol.

[essential-randomness]

re: use cases, one fun idea I can think about would be assigning people "badges" (or labels) according to their answers. I'm thinking about old-school quizilla "what character are you"-style quizes, but I can imagine looking at answers people gave to specific forms to build a profile for them...

...which specifically means anything that uses forms should be very, very careful about spelling out whether something is public, because you can get people to tell you a lot about themselves using them, and it could help build profiles for e.g. targeted advertising, or even bypassing security questions (see Risks of Participating in Social Media Quizzes or Games)

[ebwinters]

That's a cool use case, I like it. Goes into the bucket of

Different applications can react to new answers being posted in the form (via firehose)

As the protocol is right now, public/private quizzes are up to the app view, similar to mutes. The lexicon would be public and you can use it for types but if you are collecting private data you would not want to send those to the network.