vicharanashala-org/Online_Live_Polling_Dataset

Online Live-Polling Dataset

Live poll records and attendance from 47 online sessions. The data was collected in an internship programme between May 2026 and July 2026. Sessions were held over Zoom, and the polls were run with Zoom's built-in polling feature, so all tables derive from Zoom's poll and attendance exports.

Six tables. sessions.csv and polls.csv describe sessions and polls; the other four record attendance and poll answers at the level of individual participants, who appear only as anonymous ids. Tables join on session_id, poll_order and participant_id.

Files

File	Rows	Contents
data/sessions.csv	47	one row per session
data/polls.csv	604	one row per poll
data/attendance_timeline.csv	8,368	one row per session-minute: how many attendees were present
data/attendance_intervals.csv	133,559	one row per stay in a session, from joining to leaving
data/poll_responses.csv	340,668	one row per submitted poll answer
data/participant_sessions.csv	34,446	one row per participant per session

sessions.csv

8 columns, one row per session.

Column	Meaning
session_id	S01…S47, numbered chronologically by session start
day_index	programme day, 1–39; empty for the single session held outside the scheduled series
session_in_day	position within that day (1, 2 or 3); empty for that same session
attendance_span_min	last minute at which any attendee was still present
peak_concurrent	highest number of simultaneous attendees
unique_attendees	distinct attendees over the whole session
n_polls	polls launched
n_responses	responses submitted across those polls

polls.csv

10 columns, one row per poll.

Column	Meaning
session_id, day_index	as above, repeated for convenience
poll_order	position of the poll within its session, from 1
offset_min_from_start	minutes from session start to the poll's first response
response_window_s	seconds from the first response to the last
poll_type	see Poll types
n_distinct_answers	how many distinct answer strings the poll drew
n_responses	responses submitted
present_at_launch	attendees in the room when the poll opened
unique_attendees	distinct attendees over the whole session

attendance_timeline.csv

3 columns, one row per minute of each session.

Column	Meaning
session_id	as above
minute_offset	minutes from session start, from 0 to the session's attendance_span_min
concurrent_attendees	distinct attendees present at that minute

attendance_intervals.csv

4 columns, one row per stay. A participant who leaves and rejoins has one row per stay.

Column	Meaning
participant_id	anonymous participant id, see Participant ids
session_id	as above
join_offset_s	seconds from session start to joining; 0 for anyone already present at the start
leave_offset_s	seconds from session start to leaving

poll_responses.csv

4 columns, one row per answer submitted. Which answer was chosen is not included.

Column	Meaning
participant_id	anonymous participant id
session_id, poll_order	the poll answered, as in polls.csv
response_offset_s	seconds after that poll's first response; 0 for the first respondent

participant_sessions.csv

4 columns, one row for every participant who attended a session or answered one of its polls. It is a convenience summary of the two tables above.

Column	Meaning
participant_id	anonymous participant id
session_id	as above
minutes_present	total time present, with overlapping stays counted once
polls_answered	polls in that session this participant answered

Participant ids

Each person is a random id, P0001…P2821, the same in every table and every session. Every account in the Zoom reports is a participant, including the organisers' and speakers' accounts. Ids were assigned in random order and the link between an id and a person was not kept, so an id cannot be traced back to anyone. Names, email addresses, the content of answers, and all dates and clock times are removed; times appear only as offsets within a session.

Reading the columns

Participation is not a column. Divide n_responses by present_at_launch. That works for 603 of the 604 polls; the exception is the one poll nobody answered.

offset_min_from_start is measured to the first response, not to the launch. The Zoom export records when each response arrived but never records when a poll was opened, so no launch time exists in the source. The offset overstates when the poll appeared, by however long the fastest respondent took. For the same reason response_offset_s counts from the first response, not from the launch.

n_distinct_answers counts distinct answer strings received, not options offered. For a True/False item where both answers were chosen it is 2; where a poll accepted typed answers it can be large, the maximum here being 423. It is 0 for the one poll nobody answered, and 1 where every respondent gave the same answer. The distribution is 534 polls at exactly 2, 45 between 3 and 8, 22 above 8, and 3 below 2. The Zoom export does not record option lists, so the number of options a poll offered is not recoverable.

attendance_span_min is not the scheduled length. An attendee who never clicks leave keeps the meeting open, so the span overruns the real session on some days (median 157 minutes, maximum 876). peak_concurrent is the reliable measure of how full a session was.

Participation can exceed 1. present_at_launch is the room size at the poll's first response; attendees who joined during the response window and answered are counted in n_responses but not in the denominator. This happens on one poll (S03 q1: 280 responses against 263 present).

Session S34 is very small (21 unique attendees, single-digit presence at each of its four polls) and behaves unlike the rest of the corpus.

Every poll has a row, including the one nobody answered, so these are full counts rather than a filtered subset.

The tables are consistent with one another. Counting distinct participants present at each minute in attendance_intervals.csv reproduces attendance_timeline.csv exactly, and from it peak_concurrent and attendance_span_min. Counting rows of poll_responses.csv reproduces n_responses in polls.csv and sessions.csv, and the largest response_offset_s of each poll equals its response_window_s.

unique_attendees comes from Zoom's attendee summary report, while attendance_intervals.csv comes from its join-and-leave report. The two reports count slightly differently, so the number of distinct participants in a session's intervals can exceed unique_attendees (by at most 60, and equal in 7 sessions).

Stays. Most participants have several stays in a session (up to 131), since every reconnection starts a new one. 126 stays have zero length.

Participants who never answered. 3,653 rows of participant_sessions.csv have polls_answered 0. Two rows have an empty minutes_present: these participants answered a poll but do not appear in the attendance report. Of the 2,821 participants, 2,419 answered at least one poll.

Poll types

poll_type is assigned by a keyword match on the question text:

Value	Count	Matched on
assessment_tf	424	contains "true or false", "true/false", "t/f", or the word "true"
assessment_other	143	anything not matched above
affective	32	mood, feeling, energy, vibe
icebreaker	3	hobby, favourite, movie, series, breakfast
demographic	2	state, city, where are you from, gender

Rules are applied in that order, so affective, demographic and icebreaker are checked first. It is a coarse convenience label, and assessment_other is a residual rather than a category.

License

MIT License, see LICENSE.