25/10 Crowdsourcing

Purpose

• Create an environment in which good ideas and focused experiments can bubble up
• Generate and sort bold ideas for action

Facilitation Instructions

• Give every participant an index card and a pen and ask them to write down a Bold Idea and a first step
• Demonstrate one exchange-and-scoring interaction using a sample index card to clarify what is expected during the milling and scoring
• Invite everyone to mill around and pass ideas to as many people as possible in the time allotted: Mill and Pass only. No reading
• When the time is up, each person reads their card and rates the idea 1-5 (1 is low, 5 is high)
• Cards are passed around again until the “read and score” happens again. This can be repeated several times (Liberating Structures suggests 5, but less is definitely fine)
• After the final scoring round, participants add up the scores on the back of the card in their hand
• Find the best scoring ideas by conducting a countdown: who has a score of 25, 24, 23…

Products Generated

• A ranked list of bold ideas and next steps

Reference

Liberating Structures

Additional Information

• Suggest a fun but clear rating scale, for example: 1 = eh/not your cup of tea to 5 = hell yeah/sends me over the moon. The crowd needs to understand and agree with the rating system if it is to be used for decisions.
• Doing this with a smaller group (~8) may result in everyone wanting to see/review all the ideas, which is difficult with a “mill & pass” system. May want to make it clear that you will not see every idea & plan 3 rounds of feedback rather than 5, or modify the game somewhat to pass in a semi-but-not-completely-random way.