Harnessing the wisdom of crowds: Open discussion forum helps to answer sanitation related questions von Münch, E., Rieck, C. (2011)
We know it all too well from our daily work: E-mails have nowadays become
key to our highly interactive and interlinked working environment. But
despite being a useful communication tool, it provides only a one-to-one or small group communication and does not allow information to be shared with a wider group and “outsiders”.
One promising avenue is the use of discussion forums. The idea for an open
discussion forum on sanitation came from our experience that when you want
to buy a new car or have a question about your baby’s teeth: where do you
get advice from? You put your question into a search engine like Google and you end up reading other people’s postings on a discussion forum. Usually, those questions and answers prove to be very helpful.
The same mechanism can hold true for a discussion forum on sanitation
issues. This is why the secretariat of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
(SuSanA) set up a new discussion forum and launched it in July 2011:
www.forum.susana.org.
The forum is open as opposed to some existing closed forums which
require a login even just for reading or are only e-mail based.
Bibliographic information
von Münch, E., Rieck, C. (2011). Harnessing the wisdom of crowds: Open discussion forum helps to answer sanitation related questions Appropriate Technology, Volume 38, No. 4, p. 24-26
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