The
UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) operates as a creative incubator
to catalyse thinking about the impact of algorithmic intelligence
on education, research, and society more broadly. It does this by
engaging the Collective Intelligence at (and beyond) UTS, making
use of human-centred Connected Intelligence approaches
(combining the digital, physical, and social through technology), to
develop and enact Creative Intelligence [(see UTS
strategy)]1** **– we aim to work with the expertise of
stakeholder groups to design tools that help groups to innovate and that
help them in innovative ways. We’re doing this at multiple granularities
– from local projects aiming to understand what data is available in
particular silos, etc., to coarser grain work around themes (e.g.
writing analytics) – and one area I’m interested in developing is how we
work with platforms to collate, foster, and co-construct innovation. The
CATALYST European project has written a lot around this area (see e.g.
[here]2), with a [Mark Klein]3 (at MIT) also recently
writing a great review of platforms: [A Critical Review of Crowd-Scale
Online Deliberation Technologies]4 and a nice writeup in the Sloan
Management Review on [Open Innovation for organisations and product
development]5. There’s also a [long list of ideation platforms
here]6 (although, ironically it’s just a list – so it’s pretty hard
to navigate/differentiate features). I’m starting (starting) to
think about how we might use these in our work, what categories of
platform are available, and how we might modify or build on existing
platforms to create something for our own purposes. Of course lots of
tools can be used to collect knowledge, and many content management
systems are used for just this purpose (from WordPress to enterprise
solutions), as well as of course Wikis (e.g. we built some nice semantic
stuff into the [ORBIT]7 project at Cambridge). At the moment,
though, I’m interested in more specifically designed tools, and the
range of functionality available across them. I’ll write a post soon
about some possible applications for these tools.# Suggestion-centric
platforms In these the context tends to be fairly bottom up and defined
by the suggestion itself or the particular setting (e.g. an
organisation), rather than a top-down assigned topic or problem.
Obviously petition sites, and many customer relations/voice/experience
tools (e.g. [UserVoice]8 & various others, I wrote about some in
my [Nominet report]9) involve obtaining feedback on specific
actionable issues. At the Open University [ideascale]10 has been
in use for a while now to source suggestions from OU staff, which can be
voted (and commented) on, aligned with particular aims, and progressed
through a project flow. It looks like a new system called
[AHHHA]11 will do something similar…# Open Source
Suggestion-Centric platforms 1. [BBYIDX]12 – idea gathering app
quite similar to ideascale ([Best Buy is using it]13) 2.
[OpenideaL]14 (a drupal project, on [github]15) 3.
[IdeaTorrent]16 (also for drupal) – possibly a dead project?#
Challenge-centric platforms Other platforms have a focus on addressing
specific challenges or issues, sometimes within particular
challenge-blocks or times (e.g. [OpenIdeo]17 below), and in other
cases aimed at building up a knowledge base over time (e.g. [the
evidence hub]18). [Yambla]19 includes the former
challenge-element as well as features from the suggestion-centric models
above for more open-ended responses. I really like [OpenIdeo]17 in
this space, which isn’t a platform but a social-good design challenge
site based around IDEO’s design process. They make use of IDEO’s
[oiengine]20 to structure ideation. So each challenge goes
through this process (from ):
IDEO’s Design Thinking Approach
However, the system isn’t open source, and is targeted at a very
particular challenge-based structure.# Open Source Challenge-Centric
platforms * [Ideation]21 (a drupal module) works with a broad CMS
(drupal) to integrate ideation features, used in US government sites#
(Local) public engagement tools
A number of this [great set of tools]22 allow participants to
leave comments on maps (e.g. to suggest locations for community
improvements), as well as engaging in priority setting, planning
processes, and more general discussion and consultation. A great list of
resources! I’d love to think about how to use the map-based consultation
stuff in a campus context…# Social Question and Answering Platforms
Finally, taking both the suggestion-voting and challenge elements in
combination, q&a sites provide a space for a community to ask and answer
questions, an – for example in stack exchange type sites – rank both
questions and answers. Happily there are a bunch of these open source:
