Relate
Role: Leader, Researcher, UI designer
Digital technologies have created environments for large-scale conversation and collaboration around societal goals. However, they are largely built on online, individually-focused contributions divorced from the longer-term community relationships that support deep listening, constructive debate, and collaborative ideation. It is still challenging to achieve both the scale of digitally-mediated interactions and the depth of in-person relationships.
In this work, we introduce small group networks, in which large-scale collaborations are built on deeper, relational building blocks. In small group networks, groups of individuals engage in activities where they work together to generate, rank, and iterate on ideas. These activities are essentially crowdsourcing primitives like comparisons, labels, ratings, and comments, but are fundamentally relational and would typically be carried out by groups of individuals that already exist in the given community. To demonstrate small group networks, we designed Relate, a platform where teams can find short, fun, and collaborative activities for team bonding. As teams participate, they contribute to community reports for understanding issues within their local organizations and communities. In addition to demonstrating the use of relational building blocks, Relate also shows how small group activities can serve as a new domain for motivating volunteer participation, similar to prior studies on crowdsourcing through games, learning, hobbies, and personalized feedback. Together, these point to a promising space of research on the design of interfaces and algorithms for small group based crowdsourcing.