THE FACILITATOR IS A BOT: TOWARDS A CONVERSATIONAL AGENT FOR FACILITATING IDEA ELABORATION ON IDEA PLATFORMS

Idea platforms have become a well-established means for organizations for gaining valuable ideas from a diverse set of stakeholders such as customers, partners, or citizens. One major challenge in this field is how to make use of the full potential of those ideas. Hurdles towards this aim include a lack of necessary information in the idea descriptions to comprehend and effectively process them, redundancies among individual ideas and an exceedingly large pool of ideas, that make it difficult for decision makers to identify high-potential ideas. We address these challenges in the idea elaboration stage to lay the foundation for choosing the best ideas easier for further processing or evaluation by others. We choose a conversation based approach to challenge the initial idea contribution by a single contributor through structured facilitation by a non-human facilitator in the form of a conversational agent (CA). By instantiating the concept for a chat based CA in a Wizard of Oz study, we found exploratory indication that automated facilitation through a CA has the potential to be a feasible approximation to human facilitation in situations where the latter is not possible or where social control by a human facilitator might impede creativity or opennes

Workshop-based E-participation: Guidelines and Requirements for Informed Design

Citizens’ participation in the government decision-making process is a possibility for public administrations to enhance the quality of respective decisions and to gain support for their implementation. In order to establish a reference for developing effective public participation processes, evidence-based design guidelines are defined in literature. In the light of different policy choices and levels of participation, it is necessary to immerse in the design of specific participation formats. In this work, we develop guidelines for workshop-based e-participation modes based on a comprehensive literature review. Within the scope of the Design Science Research paradigm, this article emphasizes on the contribution to science and practice by means of elaborating design guidelines and specific requirements for designing effective solutions. Our findings extend existing design guidelines for public participation, focusing on e-participation. In essence, this work provides an accessible framework of design guidelines and inherent ICT requirements for establishing effective workshop-based e-participation processes