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SolutionFactory

This is a proposal for a piece of SocialSoftware that takes advantage of user participation in an online community to create an Open Knowledge Platform or KnowledgeCommons. A Solution Factory instance is designed to solve a very specfic, stated problem.

In Solution Factory’s initial manifestation, I imagine organizations would pose specific challenges to their constituencies (e.g. citizens, members, employees, customers, vendors, etc.). The participants are provided highly structured methods for contributing their insights and solution ideas (and perhaps ultimately their commitments of effort or cash). There is an additional contribution mode that allows participants to endorse, tag, link, and comment on each other’s ideas, thus encouraging the best ideas to increase in visibility and be recognized for their worth through aggregation technology (e.g. score-based filtering). The concept is to have something significantly more structured than a discussion forum, where contributions to the solution-space are categorical and template-driven, and the nodes are hub-and-spoke instead of threads. The whole model is loosely based on how design teams brainstorm to come up with creative ideas.

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(from ZbigniewLukasiak)

Dialogue Mapping feels very close to the solution factory ideas (see the diagram at: http://www.cognexus.org/id41.htm).

Some links:


Wow, thanks Zby! I have been experimenting with this since Andrew brought it up on Community wiki. I think DialogueMapping? is definitely a concept/technology/technique/tool that is related to CollectiveProblemSolving. It overcomes sorting through the “sides” in debates, and the multiple perspectives and conlusions. – SamRose

SamRose 2006-12-16 17:20 UTC


I’m reading this ‘wicked problems’ PDF and it seems really good. Thanks Zby! Gets at so many of the issues that have inspired me around DesignAsProblemSolving? and non-linear software development methodology. In particular, this idea that humans solve problems by bouncing back and forth between requirements and solution proposals hunting for opportunities to make creative headway is truly profound.

I attempted to articulate this point as the impetus for starting my own website a couple years ago (poorly in comparison, I might add). Here is a relevant post for my blog originally entitled ReverseInnovation.

KeithHopper 2006-12-20 13:56 UTC


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