CrowdSmart Glossary of Terms

Terms used by CrowdSmart to describe the operation and configuration of our platform capabilities

Administrator (Admin) - person who configures CrowdSmart Collaborations

Application - a predefined, purpose-built CrowdSmart Collaboration. Applications require little-to-no configuration for the Admin to launch.

Audience - the intended group of people who will have the opportunity to participate in a CrowdSmart collaboration

Collaboration - a set of related prompts within a collaboration application

Collaboration Exercise - an activity within CrowdSmart in which participants interact with ideas from other participants. Traditionally, a ranking exercise in which the participant sees a subset of ideas from other users, selects ideas that seem important to the prompt, and stack ranks those Ideas in order of importance.

Context or Contextual Help - Information a participant would need to know to provide responses that are relevant to the collaboration effort, usually appears in large text above the prompt.

Effort Owner - Person who will ultimately use or leverage the results of the collaboration to inform a decision

Idea - a response to an open-ended question provided by a user or, occasionally, as a seed by the collaboration administrator

Instructions or Instructional Help - clarifying information regarding how a participant should respond, like 'Do not provide Personally Identifiable Information', which usually appears in small type below the Prompt

Participant - a person who provides responses in a Collaboration

Prompt - a statement or question that instructs the user to enter a response, such as responses to an open-ended question

Question Set - a related set of prompts that operate on the same data. Traditionally includes a Rating prompt, an Open-ended Prompt and a Ranking exercise. A Collaboration can have multiple Question Sets.

Response - information a user enters to satisfy a Prompt. A response to a rating prompt is a number, a response to an open-ended prompt is one or more Ideas, a response to a collaboration exercise is a set of reviewed and ranked Ideas.

Seed - an Idea that is pre-populated into the collaboration before the collaboration is made available to the broader audience

Soft Launch - a Quality Assurance step in which the Admin invites a handful of trusted advisors to provide responses to the Collaboration before widely distributing the link to the full audience. Soft Launch is always encouraged, but not required.

View - the set of CrowdSmart screens the user can see or access. Typically, there is an Admin view and a Participant view