Crowdsourcing for Hierarchical Organizations with Rationale, Design, and Stories (CHORDS)

Hierarchical organizations exist because they can effectively martial resources to address large-scale problems. But while often effective, they are not always efficient. Such organizations should study their own performance and seek ways to improve. However, there is always work for today more pressing than investments in tomorrow; and more critically, any large, effective organization generates forces that resist change.We propose to develop methods and technology to help make organizational improvement a more efficient, continuous, creative, and successful activity. We will design and build a system that supports Crowdsourcing for Hierarchical Organizations with Rationale, Design, and Stories (CHORDS). CHORDS will leverage the latest findings on how to orchestrate ad-hoc teams of workers to address complex taskse.g., through task structuring, worker selection, joint activity selection, and decision rationale exploitation. CHORDS will also apply emerging methods and tools supporting group work on framing and solving complex problems (design collaboration tools), and just-in-time sharing of expertise (embedded story libraries).During Phase I we will: characterize options for effectively crowdsourcing organizational improvement, while integrating design support and automated guidance; illustrate our vision and reduce risk by developing a limited proof-of-concept prototype; and refine plans for Phase II, including system development, evaluation, and transition.