Facilitator-in-a-Box: Process Support Applications to Help Practitioners Realize the Potential of Collaboration Technology

TEAM-BASED INNOVATION CONTESTS FOR CROWDSOURCING: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON IDEACONNECTION PLATFORM

Crowdsourcing for innovation contests represents a promising mechanism to access and integrate external ideas. Among various crowdsourcing types, online, team-based contest is one of the most prominent one. The objective of this study is to deepen the understanding of team-based crowdsourcing by exploring specifically the issues that characterise the innovation process of crowdsourcing in a virtual team setting. To empirically pursue this aim, we conducted an interview-based case study leveraging interviews of 106 solvers and 24 facilitators moderating the team of solvers, which have participated in contests through the IdeaConnection crowdsourcing platform. We found that five main issues characterise team-based crowdsourcing competitions: Platform support, Solvers skills, Solver motivation, Solutions, and Performance. Specifically, some of these issues are in line with previous literature investigating individual crowdsourcing competition, while others are novel highlighting the peculiarity of the virtual team setting.

An Ontology for Collaborative Decision Making

This article focuses on an ontology construction for collaborative decision making. To do this, a state of the art on collaborative decision-making, on ontology engineering and on collaboration engineering has been done. An eight-step ontology development methodology was adopted and implemented to build the ontology. A corpus made up of more than seventy-seven (77) documents was the starting point for the extraction of terms from the ontology and the UML (Unified Modeling Language) language served as a description language of our ontology. This ontology is intended to be the starting point for a facilitation support system in a Collaborative Decision Making process. The aim of the work is to produce a new system according the “Facilitator in the box” paradigm.

Toward a Philosophy of Collaboration

The authors find themselves in the midst of a global social transformation that is shaping the common perception of reality. The development of technology-enabled collaborative networks, virtual collaboration, structured collaboration processes, and digital team collaboration affects every part of society. Research on collaboration and collaboration systems has achieved sufficient maturity and scope that an overall conceptual definition of collaboration is now needed and possible. This article proposes a conceptual approach and terminology as a step towards bridging isolated communities of collaborating researchers in various fields. The authors offer a fundamental philosophical description of what collaboration is (and is not) based on relevant epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological insights derived from a synthesis of existing collaboration research, and the authors outline the most obvious needs for further research toward formalizing a more fully-realized philosophy of collaboration.

Beyond Brainstorming: Exploring Convergence in Teams

Collaborative brainstorming is often followed by a convergence activity where teams extract the most promising ideas on a useful level of detail from the brainstorming results. Contrary to the wealth of research on electronic brainstorming, there is a dearth of research on convergence. We used experimental methods for an in-depth exploration of two facilitation-based interventions in a convergence activity: attention guidance (focusing participants on procedures to execute a convergence task) and discussion encouragement (engaging participants in conversations to combine knowledge on ideas). Our findings show that both attention guidance and discussion encouragement are correlated with higher convergence quality. We argue that attention guidance's contribution is in its support of coordination, information processing, and goal specification. Similar, we argue that discussion encouragement's contribution is in its stimulation of idea clarification and idea combination. Contrary to past research, our findings further show that satisfaction was higher after convergence than after brainstorming.

Facilitating Collaboration

This article explores the potential synergy between computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and collaboration engineering (CE). Both areas pursue the goal of understanding how to manage interactions in collaborative groups to achieve shared understanding, reduce process losses, and improve performance. By analyzing the research in the two areas, the authors identify several topics where exchange of research findings would be of mutual benefit. For example, research on CE can inform collaboration script research on reducing learners' cognitive load, providing sufficient guidance on the use of tools, and specifying the instructor role during the collaborative learning process. Similarly, collaboration script research can provide useful insights to CE on the appropriation and internalization of effective support strategies. CE research could also learn from script research on training group participants into specific roles. Further challenges include designing scripts that balance restrictiveness and flexibility and refining the theoretical foundation of the two research areas.