PeerToolBrainstorm. Evaluate. Decide! |
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Welcome to PeerTool
Page HelpClick the question mark icon on any page for general help with page. You can also hover over most items within a page for specific help on each item. For support, visit our Google GroupHome
PeerTool is an easy-to-use web application for collaborative problem solving. To use it, you and your group need to:
Warning! PeerTool may be hazardous to your career. Learn more 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.
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PeerTool is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3. Use the links below to view a copy of the license or download a copy of the source code. |
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