Participant-Driven Group Support Systems: An Approach to Distributed, Asynchronous Collaborative Systems

Abstract

This dissertation presents the Participant-driven Group Support System (PD-GSS)framework. This framework presents an approach for Group Support System (GSS)designers to accommodate distributed or asynchronous groups through the use ofdifferent technologies and processes than traditional GSS.The goal of the PD-GSS framework is to further involve the collaborativeparticipants during the workflow in an effort to reduce the load on the meetingfacilitator. As the name implies, it is the participants that are increasingly responsiblefor conducting and executing the required actions during a collaborative processes. Thesystem empowers the participants in the meeting to conduct the meeting themselves,reducing the need for a dedicated facilitator to guide the process.One of the modules from the PD-GSS framework, Peer-reviewed Brainstorming,was developed into a prototype and tested experimentally. This module requires eachbrainstorming idea to be routed through a peer-review process whereby the originalbrainstorming idea is edited for clarity and completeness. The goal of this new moduleis to reduce the number of low quality, noisy comments while increasing the quantity ofhigh quality comments.Ten six-person groups participated in the first experiment. Five groups wereplaced in a traditional electronic brainstorming GSS while the other five groups wereplaced in the peer-review treatment. The results indicate that the peer-review processdid control the brainstorming process, yielding a higher percentage of validbrainstorming ideas.The second module examined was the categorization module, allowing groups towork autonomously to identify similar ideas that should be grouped together in the samecategory or bucket. This new approach to the categorization of brainstorming ideasenables groups to work independently, asynchronously, and anonymously to organizethe brainstorming input.An existing GSS, ThinkTank by GroupSystems, was utilized. Eighty-one groupswere used in the second experiment to test the ability of groups to work independently,without a facilitator, in an attempt to organize brainstorming ideas. The groups workingsynchronously outperformed the groups working in a mock asynchronous setting.Likewise, the groups that had to categorize the fewest number of brainstorming ideasreceived the highest performance measures.