Special Issue for the Journal of Social Media in Organizations (JSMO)
Call for Papers: Large-Scale Ideation and Deliberation: Tools and Studies in Organizations
Editors: Gregorio Convertino, Adam Westerski, Paloma Diaz, and Anna De Liddo
Motivation
Social computing research has rapidly advanced during the past decade. Large crowds of people are now able to share knowledge using wikis, blogs, and forums; communicate using social networking platforms; and perform tasks using crowdsourcing platforms. Although those activities have become popular for casual communication and sharing, organizations have appropriated social computing for their own benefits. Thus, a new frontier for design and research has emerged: designing tools that support large-scale ideation and deliberation as well defined and repeatable processes in organizations and civic communities. In other words: designing tools to allow these communities to identify problems, generate and select solutions, and implement them as new services or products (e.g., grassroots innovation in organizations). This special issue focuses on tools and studies that are advancing this new frontier for social computing.
A number of promising applications have been developed for commercial and non-commercial uses, such as:
- Ideastorm, where customers propose new product and service ideas to Dell
- Project 10 to the 100, where individuals proposed and rated possible charitable projects for funding by Google
- Open for Questions, where citizens proposed questions to President Obama
- the LivingVoters guide, where Washington state residents deliberated about proposed changes in government policy
To address the needs for these types of systems, powerful software support platforms have also appeared (for example, see www.spigit.com, www.ideascale.com, www.brightidea.com, http://evidence-hub.net/). Many types of organizations, from business to education to government, are seeking out such platforms to include their constituencies in their deliberation processes, even as their constituencies increasingly expect such opportunities.
Those Large-Scale Ideation and Deliberation (LSID) platforms, however, face open challenges that include:
- Overwhelming contribution volumes with large redundancy and variable quality
- Visualizing and managing large-scale deliberations
- Summarizing the state and content of deliberation to promote engagement and deepen understating, comparing, prioritizing and evaluating ideas, or groups of ideas
- Generating collective creative solutions
- Translating proposals into commitment to action
- Proposing interaction, browsing, and input methods that stimulate participation and substantively empower participants
- Handling complex problems whose solutions require many interdependent parts
- Defining, evolving, and applying agreed-upon value criteria among multiple stakeholders
This special issue aims to gather experiences and reports on research done worldwide to cope with the aforementioned problems.
Call for Papers (CFP) and Review Process
We invite contributions that include (but are not limited to):
- Empirical studies of communities or collaborative practices in organizations: e.g., case studies illustrating practices of large scale and self-organized work processes that point to specific design requirements.
- Designs of new software tools or proof-of-concept prototypes supporting collective intelligence of communities of workers, or in-depth evaluations of tools already deployed that support collective intelligence in organizations.
- Theoretical contributions on collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and community-based learning in organizations, which can directly inform design and research.
- Cases of multidisciplinary research showing the interplay between field studies, analysis of requirements, and development of tools facilitating collective intelligence.
Submissions should follow the JSMO formatting guidelines for authors, available at http://www.mitre.org/jsmo. Each submission will be peer-reviewed using the following criteria:
- Significance of the contribution
- Clarity and presentation quality
- Relevance to the special issue themes
Submit papers via email to the special issue editors, whose addresses are below.
Special Issue Timeline
Submission deadline: 28 June 2014 via email to the Special Issue Editors, listed below
| Distribution of the CFP | 31 January 2013 |
| Submission deadline | 28 June 2014 |
| Reviews returned | 27 September 2014 |
| Submission deadline for completed, revised manuscripts | 25 October 2014 |
Special Issue Editors
- Gregorio Convertino: gconvertino@gmail.com
- Adam Westerski: westerski@dit.upm.es
- Paloma Diaz: pdp@inf.uc3m.es
- Anna De Liddo: anna.deliddo@open.ac.uk
Themes
The suggested topics for this special issue are grouped in three key focus areas for research and development on large-scale deliberation in organizations: theory, technology and applications.
Theory
- Collective intelligence: models of crowd knowledge, crowd aggregation, crowd reasoning
- Argumentation theories and technologies
- Models of social influence
- Influencers identification
- Measuring engagement
- Social network analysis
- Opinion diffusion models
- Principles of community self-organization and emergence of volunteering, relevance of game theory models
- Cognitive factors in ideation and deliberation
- Deliberation as structured discourse
- Discourse modeling
- Extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors
- Discovering reasoning patterns
- Network structures for collaboration
Technology
- Systems for collective policy amendment
- Role-based tools for contributors, decision-makers, reviewers, facilitators, aggregators, and group formation
- Real-time deliberation and stream reasoning
- Discourse and arguments visualization
- Visual analytics
- Analytics functionalities for reflection
- Awareness and self-correcting tools
- Automatic user profiling from contributions
- Social ideation and business process management
- Reputation systems
- Incentives and reward systems
- Voting and consensus building tools: rating, voting, commenting, value criteria definition
Applications in organizations and communities
- Grassroots innovation & decisions
- Democracy, open & accountable governance
- Community management and civic leadership
- Energy infrastructure, business strategy, public policy, emergency management
- Earth policies, social sustainability, health, aging
- Artistic cooperation and large-scale games