Administrator's Guide

As an Administrator, you will oversee all the aspects of a Decision - starting from the Ideation phase and ending with the creation of a Final Report. In this section of the tutorial, we will walk through each of the major steps in an Ethelo engagement process. 

Ideation

The first step to configuring an Ethelo Decision is Ideation; which refers to defining the potential components of group decisions to be made. These elements include the underlying issues, options, constraints, and criteria that the Ethelo algorithm will use to create the online collaboration environment, the corresponding web tools, and the space of potential scenarios that this environment and tools will be used to explore.

Configuration

The Configuration phase is the most important aspect of this tutorial and will take up most of the time. Here you will learn everything from creating a New Decision, managing its Pages, creating Options and configuring Voting Constraints to designing the aesthetic appearance of your Decision to create the kind of engagement experience you would like participants to have.  

Once the Ethelo project is configured, people can participate.

Participants Engage

Join

The first step for a participant is to join the Ethelo Decision and register. Each project has a custom URL, and Ethelo allows a variety of registration levels, depending on how private or public the process is:

• Email invitation only (private)
• Register to see and participate
• Open to see, register to participate
• Login-free

Login-free processes do not require registration. In those cases, Ethelo can monitor activity to filter out robots or duplicate entries, and ensure data integrity

Example of invitation email and login screen:

Navigation

Once a participant has joined a project, they move through the various pages from beginning to end by clicking the "next" and "back" buttons. Each page contains various tasks for the participant to complete; learning, voting, commenting, et cetera.

The various pages are listed in the menu that appears on the left-hand side. As each page is completed, a partially or fully complete check-mark will appear next to the corresponding page on the menu.

a progress bar on the top of the page indicates how much of the overall process has been completed.

Results

The Group Results are the results of the Ethelo Engine's analysis of the decision data provided by participants and the various settings in the admin panel. 

The Group Results page presents the analysis of the Options and Scenarios and includes various metrics to sort and rank them as well as a crowd and a bar-chart visualizations.

The following metrics are generated for each Option and Scenario:

• Ethelo Score: The Ethelo Score is aimed at predicting the likelihood of success of a decision, or the "strength" of a decision. It considers both support (higher is better) and conflict (lower is better, especially if fairness is important). 

• Support: the average score of the votes, where the score of totally supporting an Option is 100, and the score of totally opposing an Option is 0.

• Approval: Approval is the percentage of people who gave a positive vote rather than a neutral or negative vote. Approval above 50% is a traditional "majority".

• Conflict: Conflict is a measure of the level of disagreement in a group. Higher conflict scores represent internal resistance and risk of failure. 

Final Report

After all the participants have provided their input and the Decision period is over, the administrator will create a Final Report displaying the collective results and participants' individual input.