From time to time I find myself moderating brainstorming sessions, and have been experimenting with the K-J technique. In most cases I have participants who are remote and therefore cannot use sticky notes. I have tried several experiments using Trello, but the limited voting capabilities and the need for authentication to do anything other than add comments is a showstopper. A fair fraction of the participants either won’t create an account, or find it too daunting to add cards.
The ability to easily create forms that don’t require authentication is a huge boon for this.
Furthermore, with a little gymnastics with formulae and counting, it’s possible to create interesting voting schemes: e.g. 3 points for your highest priority, 2 for the second, 1 for the third.
Here is a simple example, with three separate forms. First, for participants to enter their names. Second, for them to enter answers to the focus question. Third, after discussion and creation of categories of answers, for them to rank the categories.
I would very much like to have a (briefly) non-authenticated kanban view that would allow participants to create categories and move the answers as “cards” between categories. That would enable the full K-J workflow, because the discussion of the categorization, while useful, will not be scalable to dozens of participants. The open permissions on the the kanban view should be something one can turn on for a brief period and then turn off when that exercise is completed.
