Improving Collaborative Convergence through Distributed and Parallel Sorting

This paper examines a convergence process of organizing ideas that are generated during collaborative idea generation activities. The method presented reduces the impact of organizing brainstorming ideas on individual participants by dividing the convergence activity into smaller, discrete tasks that can be completed individually, and in parallel, by the participants. The entire pool of brainstorming ideas is subdivided into smaller pools and each participant is then tasked with organizing one of the subsets of ideas. The results show that by dividing up the overall activity into subtasks, the subjects experienced a more favorable environment. Furthermore, the subjects were able to work through their subset of ideas and produce results that were similar to those performing the full sort of the entire pool

Crowdsourcing Convergence: Aggregating Partial Clusters to Facilitate Collaborative Convergence

This paper is an exploratory effort to investigate the possibility of using crowdsourcing to execute part of the collaborative convergence process. Participants were assigned with creating buckets or clusters from a random subset of the overall pool of brainstorming ideas. These sub-sorts were aggregated into a weighted graph and partitioned into discrete buckets. Analysis of this aggregated, consensus sort provides support that crowdsourcing may be a feasible option when organizing brainstorming ideas into discrete categories or buckets