Summary
Creating solutions for everyday problems requires out of the box solutions. For common problems that people have already worked through this is a problem since many common solutions or work arounds have already been created. Crowd sourcing these solutions are bound to run into redundancy issues if there is no arbiter to ensure there is forward momentum. To alleviate the need for such an arbiter while ensuring there are fresh ideas generated throughout the system, the team created a public sharing platform for sharing ideas. Utilizing the crowd platform, notepads (symbolizing new ideas or small excerpts) can be retrieved from others on the same platform through a similarity ranking.
Reflection
I can greatly appreciate the effort the team has gone to solve this problem. From working within a team of technologically advanced peers, I have been able to collaborate and learn greatly from each of the members. Unfortunately for many teams (teams cross-located across the globe or teams working remotely similar to the Corona Virus working from home order) the kind of general idea generation is greatly limited to the technology being used. Whiteboard technology like Draw.io and Microsoft Whiteboard is great but takes extra time to be adapted and written out. A design like this hosted by a company’s platform could provide greater collaboration across teams for potential side projects or to create a better future direction for the company.
I do appreciate how simplistic and relatively familiar the design that the team made of the platform. Utilizing a similar design of sticky notes from Windows (at least version 7) is a great way to lower the “ramp up” or time of education the user has to take to learn the system. Despite this the team reported the workers needed to use a lot of mental effort to accomplish their tasks that were given to them. It is interesting to see not only with a common design there is always the “writers block” or the mental stopping point that is common throughout many people.
Questions
- Collaboration is a great way for ideas to be shared and improved. This is only increased when the participants have different experiences and backgrounds, helping to provide potentially new perspective onto the idea. What was your best idea collaboration you have had so far (can be from a professional environment or research environment)?
- Unfortunately as described earlier there are a multitude of problems and issues that may arise when teams of people work or interact remotely. These problems are only further exemplified through the recent stay at home orders across the globe due to the Corona Virus typically only permitting essential workers. What types of issues (technological or not) have you experienced working with someone across technology?
- Given how wide spread and with a potential spread of the Corona Virus this is predicted to last until at least August of 2020. With this it is likely people will still be hesitant to go directly back to work and even more so openly work together. Would you use this technology to help brainstorm with others in your field (or even in general)?
In response to your second question, I find that it’s really hard to organize and share information when you have to do it virtually. I work as a TA and we used to hold office hours in person, but now we have to do it over Zoom. It is much harder to show the students what they are doing wrong when we do it over oom. It’s hard to point at problem or draw out examples of what might be causing problems. The technology just feels like its a barrier that’s preventing you from seamlessly working with the other person. I think that an idea like the one described in the paper might help these kinds of issues when it comes to ideation. Ideation is really hard to do online, but being able to easily organize and see all of the ideas might makes it a little easier.