Modifiers for Quality Assurance in Group Facilitation

Abstract

A key task of a professional facilitator is to assure the quality of the knowledge products created through collaborative effort. To manage the quality of the knowledge a group generates, facilitators attend to, judge, and question the quality of the contributions a group makes, the decisions it makes and the commitments its members make toward achieving the group's goals. When facilitators or group members detect deficiencies in ideas, decisions, agreements, or artifacts, facilitators may need to intervene to support the group in improving the quality of their output, without disrupting the flow of the group process. In this paper we present a framework for quality assessment and a toolbox with flexible interventions that can be added to a collaborative process on the fly as soon as quality deficiencies are detected. The toolbox is a set of conditional adjustment interventions that a facilitator can add to other facilitation techniques so as to guard the quality of the group's intellectual products. The toolbox can also be used as a starting point for designing intelligent agents that support the automatic detection of quality deficiencies.

Towards Artificial Intelligence Augmenting Facilitation: AI Affordances in Macro-Task Crowdsourcing

“…Building upon the current, broad understanding of crowdsourcing governance (Blohm et al 2020 ; Pedersen et al 2013 ; Shafiei Gol et al 2019 ) and facilitation (Antunes and Ho 2001 ; Bruno et al 2003 ; Kolfschoten et al 2011 ; Maister and Lovelock 1982 ; Zajonc 1965 ) offered in the literature – in particular, an existing definition by Bostrom et al ( 1993 ) – we define macro-task crowdsourcing facilitation thus: Facilitation in macro-task crowdsourcing initiatives comprises all observing and intervening activities used before, during, and after a macro-task crowdsourcing exercise to foster beneficial interactions among crowd workers aimed at making (interim-) outcomes easier to achieve and ultimately align joint actions with predefined goals. …”

“…Building upon the current, broad understanding of crowdsourcing governance (Blohm et al 2020;Pedersen et al 2013;Shafiei Gol et al 2019) and facilitation (Antunes and Ho 2001;Bruno et al 2003;Kolfschoten et al 2011;Maister and Lovelock 1982;Zajonc 1965) offered in the literature -in particular, an existing definition by Bostrom et al (1993) -we define macro-task crowdsourcing facilitation thus:…”

“…The evaluation of the workers’ contributions could also be drastically simplified by designing appropriate systems that leverage the potential of text mining and natural language generation to automatically generate reports or summaries (Füller et al 2021 ; Rhyn et al 2020 ). Such AI-augmented facilitation systems could improve human facilitation (Adla et al 2011 ; Siemon 2022 ), (partially) automate facilitation processes (Gimpel et al 2020 ; Jalowski et al 2019 ; Kolfschoten et al 2011 ), or even wholly replace the facilitator with an AI agent (de Vreede and Briggs 2019 ).…”

“…of relevant information and instructions regarding the tasks, presented in a comprehensible and appealing wayAntunes and Ho (2001),Blohm et al (2020),Kolfschoten et al (2011), de Vreede et al (2002,Erickson et al (2012),Xia et al (2015), Zuchowski et al (2016) Workflow Design & Selection Composing a sequence of necessary work steps to be executed on the platform to address the designed tasks by (a team of) workers Assis Neto and Santos (2018), Briggs et al (2013), Geiger et al (2011), Hetmank (2013), Khalifa et al (2002), Kolfschoten et al (2007) Worker Motivation Triggering workers' intrinsic or extrinsic motivation in order to stimulate a high rate of contributions and a high level of engagement on the platform Askay (2017), Adla et al (2011), Azadegan and Kolfschoten (2014), Blohm et al (2020), Chittilappilly et al (2016),Vukovic et al (2010), de Vreede et al (2002) Contribution Support Assisting the workers in the execution of their tasks through explanations, consultation, or training to foster task completion Adla et al (2011), Blohm et al (2018), de Vreede et al (2002), Franco and Nielsen (2018), Hosseini et al (2015), Tavanapour and Bittner (2018b) Performance Monitoring Using predefined measurements to measure, analyze, and understand workers' activity and interactions, as well as the quality of contributions Blohm et al (2018), Briggs et al (2013), Gimpel et al (2020), Kolfschoten et al (2011), Nguyen et al (2015), Vivacqua et al (2011) Tool Usage & IntegrationIntroduction and utilization of (technical) tools to ease the execution of tasks and communication and collaboration among the workersBriggs et al (2013), de Vreede et al (2002,Jespersen (2018),Kolfschoten et al (2007),Rhyn and Blohm (2017),Tazzini et al (2013) Crowd ModerationObserving and guiding the workers' communication by understanding group dynamics, recognizing systemic misunderstandings, and identifying or resolving conflictsAdla et al (2011),Chan et al (2016), de Vreede et al (2002,Faullant and Dolfus (2017),Franco and Nielsen (2018),…”

Collaboration Engineering: Reflections on 15 Years of Research & Practice

“…Further research produced a more detailed and technology-independent conceptualization of thinkLets that situated a technique in a larger context of relationships among objects ( Figure 1). The key elements were [26,28]: 1. Name, an easy-to-remember mnemonic.…”