1. Watch the not-so-short (24 min. Sorry!) tutorial screencast below (or at least read the script beneath it.)
2. Register and confirm your identity by email
3. Start collaborating!

PeerTool Introduction from Michael Ellis on Vimeo.

SCRIPT FROM INTRODUCTORY VIDEO

INTRO
    - I'm Mike Ellis, author of PeerTool, a free web application for
      collaborative brainstorming and decision making.
    - Peertool is designed for use by small groups, especially boards,
      committees, teams and task forces in the non-profit sector.
    - Peertool is available for your use at peertool.appspot.com
    - You can also download the complete source code and install it on a server
      of your choice.
    - This screencast will focus on using the application.
    

REGISTERING
    - For your privacy and security, we require you to register an account.
    - Fill in your name, email, and choose a good password
    - Read the terms of service and click submit.
    - You'll receive a confirming email from peertool@gmail.com.
    - If you don't see it, check your spam folder.
    - Click the link, then log in

CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY
    - In PeerTool, a Problem is any well-defined task or challenge.
    - Solutions are possible responses to the problem
    - Criteria are distinct qualities for comparing solutions.
    - You could use a number of different synonyms:
        - Mission, ideas and values
        - Position, candidates and qualifications
        - Campaign, positions, and (appeal to) constituencies
        - ...
    - These concepts will become more clear as we walk through PeerTool's
      usage and features.

NEW
    - Let's start with creating a new Problem.
    - Click the New button in the menu.
    - Put a short title on the first line
    - Write a description of the problem
    - Your description can include hyperlinks, images, and embedded videos
    - Optionally, specify some different terminology
    - Click Submit

EDIT
    - This is the window where you and your team brainstorm ideas.
    - To help you keep track of what's what PeerTool uses 3 icons.
        - Rubik's cube for problems
        - Light bulb for solutions
        - Gauge for criteria
    - PeerTool helps you get started by suggesting a default solution and a
      catch-all criterion.
    - To see the full text of any item, click the label beside the icon.
    - To add a new item, click the icon beside the 'New' label
    - As you did with the problem description, use the editor to provide a
      title and description

INVITE
    - PeerTool assumes a certain level of trust amomg your group.
        - It's the same level of trust you would expect in a group discussion
          by email.
            - you know each other's email addresses
            - you trust each other to keep information confidential
    - To invite others, enter their email addresses one by one.
    - The invitations are not visible until you check the "Issue Invitations"
      box at the bottom of the page.
    - Issuing invitations makes some important changes in the problem:
        - It now belongs to the group.
            - Any group member can add new items and comments.
            - Any group member can invite new members.
            - No one can edit existing items or invitations.
            - But items can be deleted by a 75% super majority.

    - To discourage spammers, PeerTool does not send email to the people you
      invite.
    - If they are registered with PeerTool, they'll see your invitation next
      time they log in. 
        - In the future we may allow registered users to select a profile
          option that will enable email notifications.
    - Icons beside each invitation show who has accepted or declined. 

    - Problems are isolated from each other by their invitation lists.
        - You can participant in many different problems with entirely
          different teams.
        - No one has access or even knows about the existence of any problem
          without an invitation.

CHOOSE
    - This is where you accept or decline invitations
    - or choose which problem to work on
    - The table shows information about problems you've been invited to.
      It contains 
        - the title of each invitation,
        - who invited you, 
            - they know your email so you get to see theirs
        - Your acceptance status,
        - The current number of people who've accepted invitations.
        - The time since the last activity by any team member.
    - New invitations are shown in plain text, 
        - accepted ones as hyperlinks, 
        - rejected ones are struck through.
    - To accept invitations, click the check boxes and click Submit.
    - To reject an invitation, you currently have to accept it first. 
        - We're working on fixing that.
    - When you reject an invitation, you'll see an alert telling you:
        - Any responses you've made to the problem will be deleted.
        - The problem itself will be deleted when all active members resign.
    - To work on a particular problem, click its link. 
    - You'll be taken initially to the Respond page.

RESPOND
    - This is where you evaluate solutions, select criteria weights, and enter
      comments.
    - Each solution has a slider for each of the currently defined criteria.
        - Adjust each slider to indicate your assessment for each criterion.
        - The scale is -1.0 to +1.0 with -1 being extremely negative and +1
          extremely positive.
        - Zero is neutral, i.e. no opinion.
    - Toward the bottom of the page, each criterion is listed with a single
      slider beneath it.
        - These sliders are for your assessment of the relative importance of
          each criterion.
        - The scale is 0.0 to 1.0 with 0 being no importance and 1 being
          highest importance.
    - Internally PeerTool normalizes your criteria settings so that they add up
      to 1.0. 
        - This ensures that each person's solution assessments carry the same
          total weight.
        - If you set them all to 1.0 and there are 4 criteria, they'll each be
          normalized to 0.25
        - Same thing if you set them all to 0.0 or any other value.
        - A further example: if there are 4 criteria and you set them to 1,
          0.5, 0.5, and 0.0 the normalized values will be 0.5, 0.25, 0.25, and
          0.0.
            - After normalization, the first is still twice as important as the
              second and third and the fourth is still of no importance.
        - You don't need to worry much about this. Just set the sliders in the
          way that visually reflects the importance of the criteria to you.
    - As with the Edit page, you can click item labels to show or hide the full
      descriptions.
    - You can also enter comments on any solution, criterion or on the problem
      itself.
        - Your evaluations are anonymous, but your comments will show your user
          name
    - Finally, you can recommend deletion of any solution or criterion.  If 75%
      of your team agree, it will be removed.
    - Remember to click Submit to record your responses.

RESULTS
    - PeerTool computes each persons assessments of all solutions over all
      criteria.
    - The graphs will update in real time as new responses come in.
    - The page help has some very detailed discussion about the meaning of the
      graphics.
    - I'm only going to briefly summarize them here.
    - The solutions are ranked by overall favorability with the most favorable
      at the top.
    - The small pie charts track how many team members have responded to each
      solution and criterion.
        - This is necessary because new solutions and criteria can be added by
          any team member at any time.
        - Think of them as traffic signals - full green means everyone has
          responded.
            - Anything else, proceed with caution. All the results aren't in.
    - The solution histograms show the counts of fully weighted positive and
      negative responses.
        - Responses are color-coded. Negative blue, neutral gray, positive red.
        - The colors aren't strictly necessary. They're there to help you
          orient your eye in these small unlabeled graphs.
        - Click the graph to show weighted and raw counts for each criterion.
    - The criteria histograms show counts of the normalized responses from all
      users to each criterion.
        - The bars are black since no color is needed to highlight positive vs
          negative.
        - Criteria are listed by overall importance with the most important at
          the top.
    - You can download a CSV file containing all the response data.
        - Useful for specialized analysis.
        - Privacy of individual responses protected by randomized IDs.

USING PEERTOOL EFFECTIVELY
    - Start small and iterate.
        - It's not necessary define all possible solutions and criteria at the
          beginning.
        - Consider delivering the problem to the group with only the
          description and the default solution and criterion.
    - Keep a manageable number of solutions and criteria.
        - If you define 20 solutions and 20 criteria, you'll have 420 sliders
          to adjust!
        - Use deletion votes to remove clearly unfavorable solutions and
          clearly unimportant criteria.
        - Leaving in the 'Everything else' default criterion provides a way for
          members to implicitly include minor considerations in their
          responses.
    - Use the results page to facilitate discussion.
        - Focus on highly weighted criteria to avoid arguing over trivia.
        - If there is widespread disagreement, it may be because the solution
          and criterion descriptions are incomplete or unclear.
            - or it may be that some members have different experience or
              information
            - or team members may have different interests and values.
    - Use the results to propose new solutions that combine the best features
      of existing solutions.

CLONING
    - Click the clone button to generate a new problem from an existing one.
        - Contains problem description, solutions, criteria and invitations.
        - All responses and comments are deleted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    - Web2py by Massimo di Pierro
        - Awesome enterprise web development framework
        - Most helpful discussion group I've ever encountered.
    - CKEditor by Frederico Krabben
        - full featured html editor
    - jQuery by John Resig
        - takes the pain out of javascript 
    - Python by Guido van Rossum
        - most productive programming language I've ever used.
    - Google App Engine and Google Code
        - free hosting for open source applications and source code.
    
    - Influences
        - Roger Fisher (Getting to Yes, Harvard Program on Negotiation)
        - James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds)
        - Lotfi Zadeh (Fuzzy Logic)
        - Antonio D'Amasio (The Feeling of What Happens)

    - Al Jacobson, friend and early supporter of PeerTool
    - Christine Grant - my partner in life and in business


FINALLY
    - If you've listened this far, thanks very much for your attention and
      interest and I hope you find PeerTool useful.