April 22, 2008
OU Suggestion Box
The story so far... the first time I saw our current VC at a 'meet the troops' session several years ago, someone suggested during the Q&A session at the end that a 'suggestion box' scheme might not be a bad idea for helping support (attempts at) innovation within the OU... several years on, and, err....
Anyway, over on Stuart's Social Communications blog today, I was overjoyed to see his post about about OU IdeaScale, a vote 'em up, vote 'em down suggestion box courtesy of Ideascale.
For those of you not keeping up at the back there, I think it was Dell who a year or so ago started the current round of 'listen to the customer' suggestion boxes with their bespoke IdeaStorm website.
More recently, Starbucks released what may well be a mashup suggestion box site on the Salesforce platform: My Starbucks Idea.
Ideascale moves the game on by offering a hosted, generic solution to setting up your own online suggestion box. Whilst the interface, user registration and moderation tools still need a bit of work, it looks like it could be quite fun... ;-)
To see the OUtrageous* suggestion box, visit http://ou.ideascale.com/.
(I'm not sure how long it'll remain there, though - the service is in beta only for a short time, and may then introduce a payment plan (which really should be for the white label, skin-it-yourself version, IMHO) - but who knows... maybe it'll be around long enough to catch a good idea or two...?! ;-) And even then, if a payment plan is enforced for the service...? Well, who knows? If the site is generating traffic, interest and ideas, what price do we put on a good idea?)
One thing I'd be interested to see appearing on the site would be future course suggestions, just to get a feeling for how crowd intelligence might be used to inform our curriculum planning activities, if nothing else?
I've posted before about how search powered prediction markets might also be used to help us identify possibly attractive courses, so maybe it's time to think about that possibility again too.... (prediction markets themselves keep hitting the news at the moment because Google has been using them)hmmm (thinks), Stuart mentioned that our Site Intelligence web analytics tool has archived data going back some time...hmmm, again... do I maybe feel a model coming on?! That said, most of the prediction market apps I had bookmarked appear to have deadpooled... what does that say about them, I wonder? ;-) This one still seems to be around though: Inkling Markets and this project may still be active: Zocalo)
*OUtrageOUs = unofficial, public facing, OU related webservice that's such a good idea that it can't not be done - so it has been... act first, get permission later... if permission is refused, someone will probably set up an equivalent "fake OU" service anyway...
Posted by ajh59 at April 22, 2008 08:56 PM