Designing a facilitators cockpit for an idea management system

Abstract

We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS). IMS are an emerging class of collaborative software tools aimed at business organizations or local geographic communities. Through these systems users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that is lacking lack adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators, who are the administrators in charge of reviewing, organizing, and selecting the ideas as they are generated. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. In this paper we point to the unmet needs of these users, describe the design of a system prototype, and the evaluation of a first version of this prototype to test our design.