BlueSky: Crowd-Powered Uniform Sampling of Idea Spaces.

Design contests and group creativity support systems have demonstrated the value of crowds for producing a solution to a design or engineering problem. However, when the goal is not one idea, but many ideas, an uncoordinated crowd effort would likely lead to a set of ideas clustered around those that are easiest to think of. We present BlueSky, a crowd-powered system that coordinates microtask workers to enumerate a uniform sample of textual ideas on a given topic. Through the process of soliciting ideas, an ontology is developed, which is used to categorize the ideas in the list. That categorization then reveals combinations of attributes that have not yet been covered. Our evaluation with four list topics compared BlueSky to freeform solicitation of ideas with respect to comprehensiveness (coverage over the entire idea space) and uniformity (mitigating the tendency to emphasize ideas that are easy to think of).