Experiment Conclusions

From the responses that we received, it was possible to draw the following conclusions:

• People will often respond much more readily to a question that relates directly to them, rather than a general question.
• People have a strong engagement with online content, and sharing this with others has become a natural activity that users enjoy doing.
• It is much more effective to ask an open question that allows anybody to respond, rather than try to force a response.
• Offering some form of payment is a good way to motivate people to respond.

Although at times we were successful in prompting a response, we failed to establish a collaborative environment in which a collective intelligence could be built. We had hoped that our participants would engage with each other and interact in a natural way as is common on Facebook. Unfortunately the way in which we set up our experiments created an artificial situation and did not facilitate the natural flow of ideas.

There are several ways in which we could improve our methods for future studies:

• We could send out an event invitation to all of our Facebook connections. This could outline the purpose of the study and what we hope to achieve. Doing this would mean that people who were interested would essentially volunteer to particpate. They would understand what was required of them, and interact with others that were involved with the study.
• We could use our statuses over a long period of time to ask a variety of questions. The short experiment that I did with this seemed to elicit a more natural response. We could even experiment with tagging specific friends in the questions to prompt them to respond.
• We could post our questions on our friend's walls. This would make them personally directed and hopefully the recipient would feel obligated to respond. One problem with this is that it is unlikely that others would get involved in the conversation.
• We could send questions out to individuals, asking them to add something and pass it on to some friends, and return it to us. We would lose control over who was receiving the questions, and hopefully receive some interesting responses.