[OSList] meaning making with thousands of interviews

Fri Jan 13 11:19:16 PST 2012

hi christine,

this question came to me from two different directions, here on the oslist
and from a local chicago colleague.  glad to see it's getting around.

i haven't seen sensemaker (yet), but i had a chat about this with my wife,
who does employee engagement surveys for tens of thousands of employees at
once, often with participants able to make comments in their own words.

in their proprietary software, the first thing they do with all those
comments is create a word cloud, with most frequent words displayed
largest.  their system also allows cutting the data in many ways, and
making word clouds for subset groups.  the latter didn't seem necessary, as
the whole point of your exercise is not about dividing people but rather
working toward agreeemnt.  add to that my thought that the challenge is not
so much technical, as social:  how to get people to read/listen in mulitple
interations, so that the processing happens inside of them, not just or
only in an online server someplace.

so what i imagined was a system that would allow the following:

1. ask a big question, ai/ost open question
2. collect lots of written responses
3. build a word cloud from all the replies

now, this is where it starts to get interesting...

4. allow people to click on any word in the cloud
5. show them 10 or 12 or whatever responses from others
6. let them mark each one as "disagree tend-to-disagree neutral
tend-to-agree and agree"

now we have a pile of comments that can be sortable by keywords, how much
we agree, so for some subset of the most-used keywords, make a word cloud,
using only the most highly agreeable comments.  this sets up a system that
gives more and more attention to the most agreeable comments.

then the loop could be closed by asking for comments on what could/should
be done and/or what other next questions should be asked.  the system might
allow those who've read/rated some threshhold number of comments to post a
new question.

the key thing it seems to me is to give some incentive to listening, not
just commenting.

to that end, another system i envisioned was based on the 2x2 maps the
nytimes has been doing on big issues, like the debt ceiling vote this
summer.  their system is a big grid, two overlapping axes... so people can
pick any spot in one of four quadrants, based on their thoughts on two
overlapping questions, and leave a comment in that spot.  my thought was to
have that sort of map, but make it able to prompt people to come back and
comment again every few days -- and then be able to display each person's
and the whole group's (flock's) movement over time.  in a for instance, we
might take an issue as the first question and "explore vs act" as the
second question... as pressure builds on the action end of the one axis,
the conversation might spill into multiple action conversations, or a new
grid with four  actions to be deliberated.

anyway, these are the ideas that came up here as a result of this question.

m

--

Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates
312-280-7838 (mobile)

http://MichaelHerman.com
http://ManorNeighbors.com
http://OpenSpaceWorld.org

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Christine Whitney Sanchez <
cwhitneysanchez at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion, Ria.  Sensmaker is coming up quite a bit.  And
> who knows, we may just invent something new.
>
> Hugs to you and Mary-Alice!
>
> Christine
> Christine Whitney Sanchez, Partner
> Innovation Partners International
> 480.759.0262
> www.innovationpartners.com
>
> On Jan 12, 2012, at 6:34 AM, Ria Baeck wrote:
>
>  The only one that I know would be Sensemaker, from Dave Snowden and his
> Cynefin framework. Not Open Source though, not for free I guess, and I'm
> not sure if you can use it as 'outsiders'.
>
> Otherwise we could invent maybe something new? Then you would need to
> invite Mary-Alice Arthur; master storyteller and co-inventor of Collective
> Story Harvest.
> Mary-Alice Arthur <mary-alice at getsoaring.com>
>
> With love,
> Ria
>
> On 12/01/12 06:08, Christine Whitney Sanchez wrote:
>
> Dear Open Space Friends,
>
>  A vision is emerging from Occupy Cafe <http://www.occupycafe.org> to
> conduct a mass mobilized Appreciative Inquiry into the Occupy Movement.
>  The vision is potent and includes, as Ben Roberts said,* the huge need
> for developing harvesting/synthesizing processes.*
> *
> *
> In my experience, being able to make meaning with thousands of interview
> summaries is both an exciting and  formidable task.  I would appreciate any
> ideas or experience you have in using software or online tools to do
> large-scale collective meaning making.
>
>  Warm wishes from a cool Phoenix evening,
>
> Christine
>  Christine Whitney Sanchez, Partner
> Innovation Partners International
> 480.759.0262
>  www.innovationpartners.com
>       <mime-attachment.png><mime-attachment.png>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OSList mailing list
> To post send emails to OSList at lists.openspacetech.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to OSList-leave at lists.openspacetech.org
> To subscribe or manage your subscription click below:http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
> OSList mailing list
> To post send emails to OSList at lists.openspacetech.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to OSList-leave at lists.openspacetech.org
> To subscribe or manage your subscription click below:
> http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OSList mailing list
> To post send emails to OSList at lists.openspacetech.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to OSList-leave at lists.openspacetech.org
> To subscribe or manage your subscription click below:
> http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20120113/cec44c98/attachment-0008.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 9699 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20120113/cec44c98/attachment-0016.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 12179 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20120113/cec44c98/attachment-0017.png>