Social web technologies have opened unprecedented opportunities for public- and private-sector entities to leverage the collective power of remotely-connected online participants to solve shared problems. However, both practitioners and researchers report that the most challenging issue in open participatory problem-solving initiatives is keeping online participants continuously engaged in a specific project, with sustained interest throughout the entire project cycle. Mindful of the opportunities and challenges of participatory online problem-solving, this study aims to accomplish two research goals: First, based on a theoretical understanding of sustained participatory engagement, we explore managerial and technological innovations that use social web technologies to foster online participants' continuous engagement in shared problem-solving projects. Second, we develop intervention techniques to expedite and sustain the collective ideation process, to enhance the likelihood that genuinely creative and useful problem-solving ideas can be effectively and continuously gathered from participants' ongoing contributions. To achieve these goals, the project pursues a three phased research plan: In the first phase, we seek to identify message-presentation formats that increase the conversion rate of online visitors into contributing participants. In the second phase, we seek to identify user-interface designs that facilitate goal-oriented human-computer interaction and sustain participant engagement over time. In the third phase, we seek to develop and field test brainstorming techniques that leverage social-web interfaces to promote the collaborative ideation process.
Our proposed study advances practical and theoretical understanding of engagement in online collaboration to solve shared problems. We have built a close partnership with a leading crowdsourcing firm, which provides a participatory technological platform to facilitate collective problem solving in cities, school districts, universities, distributed research communities, etc. This organization has made available data from over 250 real-world problem-solving projects for our analysis. Moreover, the organization has agreed to implement our proposed technological and process interventions in a series of empirical comparative field-tests. These investigations will allow us to develop a theory-driven and evidence-based comprehensive online participatory decision management system that will employ the affordances of social computing to support virtual organizations of all types in maximizing participant engagement in creative collaborative deliberation and problem-solving.
