A friend of mine once wanted to organise a Delphi method with several hundred experts. And he had a problem.
A Delphi method consists of several rounds in which experts fill in a questionnaire on a specific topic. The questionnaire is sent on-line and every expert answers the questions behind his/her desk at work. But he had repeatedly experienced a low response rate. Participants would easily forget the questionnaire in the flow of their daily work and he was fed up with sending endless reminders.
Using technology the old-fashioned way
So he decided to fill a huge room with all connected computers and called for a meeting. It worked and within a day his whole Delphi exercise was realised.
Listening to his story I thought: how strange! Here you have these computers that allow for spreading in location and time but to make it work my friend needed to gather participants ánd computers at the same time in the same room. Using the potential of new technology is apparently not that evident.
Making my own website participative: questions to you
And here I am using a piece of modern technology (my website) to communicate with the people about work, ideas, insights. And I also have the impression I’m doing the same thing as my friend. You, as a visitor of my website come and go: you click on a few pages, read some material and off you are towards other on-line destinations.
This is not what I would call participative. And when it comes to shifting towards the digital variant of participation I’m much less experienced. Still I feel this website could be much more participative and interactive.
So please allow me to tap into your creativity and start an on-line brainstorm:
- What good experiences do you have or know of with on-line participative processes?
- And how could these be applied to this website?
I suspect people suffer from herd mentality more than they’d like to admit. Once a website has many hits, it’ll just continue to attract more. If it doesn’t have many hits, it’ll stay that way.
The WIIFM factor is quite strong too. I’d participate in online processes for a few reasons: (i) the moderator is someone I know, respect, trust – not just intellectually, but as a person (ii) the topic is something I’m curious to find out more about, or that I’ve already been thinking/reading/working on (iii) to sound out known people who will be there in the discussion (the crowdsourcing idea) (iv) there are low/no barriers to entry e.g. membership fee (v) the online activities are at decent hours e.g. I almost never participate in the Eastern Time webinars, since that’s like 2-3am Singapore time! (vi) try out a new technology that I think could be applicable for work
Someone once told me that blogs worked especially well for the large group participation events that he designs and runs when they are used for pre-event input gathering. Seems to me like there are a few features that makes it work:
– certainty that online inputs will be used
– commitment from the people in the group because they are the same people who will turn up for the physical events
– consistency between online discussion themes and real life conversation issues and decision-making.