All,

Thanks for taking the time to participate in the "One Year After Bin Laden" poll initiated on May 2, 2012. I appreciate your support in this third crowdsourcing experiment, and I wanted to post the first tabulated results I've completed. About once per week, over the next several weeks, I'll post the results of your contributions in hopes that we can all learn about the direction of terrorism and al Qaeda a year after the death of its founder. Here is the breakdown of participants in the poll, and beginning tomorrow, I'll start posting the results of each question broken down by the different groups (academic, professional, domestic, international, etc.) Again, thanks for your support and I hope you find the results to be worth the effort you put into the survey.

Best Wishes,

Clint Watts

Here's Result #1 from the "One Year After Bin Laden" Poll:

"On May 2, 2012, I launched the “One Year After Bin Laden” poll asking readers to assess what the effect has been of Bin Laden’s death on al Qaeda and international terrorism. This survey was the first annual follow up to the “AQ Strategy 2011-2012″ and “Post UBL Survey” conducted immediately before and immediately after Bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011. Note, this year’s crowdsourcing experiment asked the crowd to assess the outcomes of the collective forecasts made by several hundred respondents in 2011. The questions for this year’s survey were direct followups to the questions asked one year earlier.

Thanks to all those that took the time to complete the “1 Year After Bin Laden” survey. Your collective contributions resulted in 274 participants answering some portion of the survey and roughly 185 respondents completing all of the questions.

This post provides a summary of the responses to demographic questions posed during the conduct of the “1 Year After Bin Laden” survey. This post mirrors the demographic roll up generated during the 2011 surveys in order to compare the makeup of this year’s (2012) crowd to the sample queried last year (2011). For a comparison to the initial crowdsourcing forecast, see this post from May 10, 2011 (AQ Strategy 2011-2012 & Post UBL Poll Overview).

Here are graphs (see link) showing the professional, education and academic focus of respondents to the survey. Here’s some comparisons to last year’s respondents.

Again, the respondents have a high level of education with more than half having a MA or higher degree. In fact, the distribution of education attainment in the 2012 sample almost matches the 2011 sample exactly.

The professional makeup of the 2012 respondents is quite similar to the 2011 respondents. This year has fewer students and military respondents, but slightly more academia and government contractor respondents.

The academic focus of respondent’s degrees in the 2012 sample again almost matches the distribution of degrees from the 2011 sample.

The distribution of the demographic samples is quite similar between 2011 and 2012. Thus, it should be quite interesting to see which academic and professional groups have changed their minds since their collective forecasts immediately following Bin Laden’s death.

For charts and graphs displaying the results, see this link:http://selectedwisdom.com/?p=740