Qualitative, Quantitiative Evaluation of Ideas in Brain Writing Groupware

The problem with traditional Brain Writing (BW) is that the users are restricted from viewing all sets of ideas at one time; and they are also restricted from writing down more than three ideas at a time. In this research we describe distributed experimental environment for BW which was designed to obtain better results and can thus eliminate the problems of traditional BW technique. The actual experimental system is an integration of three BW modes with mutually different features and characters. We conducted three different tests implementing this environment, and confirmed quality and quantity of ideas generated by three different groups. It was confirmed that unrestricted inputs are effective in generating a large quantity of ideas, whereas limiting the number of sharable/viewable ideas shows better tendency in some aspects. However, qualitative evaluation results were not confirmed as different functions show variant results. The evaluation of the functions that support viewing and sharing of ideas show that synergy is not always an advantage in generating ideas. The results of number of ideas in correlation with time show that 20 minutes time was appropriate to conduct BW in distributed environment