IdeaHound: Self-sustainable Idea Generation in Creative Online Communities

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27 March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2874335 Abstract One main challenge in large creative online communities is helping their members find inspirational ideas from a large pool of ideas. A high-level approach to address this challenge is to create a synthesis of emerging solution space that can be used to provide participants with creative and diverse inspirational ideas of others. Existing approaches to generate the synthesis of solution space either require community members to engage in tasks that detract from the main activity of generating ideas or depend on external crowd workers to help organize the ideas. We built IDEAHOUND a collaborative idea generation system that demonstrates an alternative “organic” human computation approach, where community members (rather than external crowds) contribute feedback about ideas as a byproduct of an activity that naturally integrates into the ideation process. This feedback in turn helps the community identify diverse inspirational ideas that can prompt community members to generate more high-quality and diverse ideas.