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Synthetron helps managers get better insights by mobilising the extensive pool of knowledge available among stakeholders. Synthetron offers a collaborative listening discussion where participants freely filter out the best insights from all those put forward by the group.
Synthetron provides an ASP-based service that can be embedded into your own website or run via ours. Participants input their opinions and a proprietary collaborative filtering mechanism picks up the best insights from the collective input and outputs a ranked list of opinions and observations. The core step in the process is the Synthetron session where people are invited to participate anonymously in a peer-to-peer debate. The technology is scalable so large numbers of people can participate in the session (up to 1000), giving the flexibility to include a variety of individuals in the process.
A moderator organises the session into 10 minute topic sections and participants freely discuss the open questions. If the conversation drifts too far from the objectives of the session, the moderator can intervene to correct that.
Participants contribute their own ideas and evaluate those put forward by others using a simple one-click scoring mechanism.
The system organises participants as a “basket of oranges” (see diagram). Each individual “orange” has a local subgroup of neighbouring oranges. Each individual’s subgroup is unique, so we avoid the risk of “groupthink”. 
An opinion which gets a good level of support from its neighbouring oranges becomes a first level synthetron. It then migrates around the basket of oranges testing support as it goes. The immediate outcome of a Synthetron discussion is the list of Synthetrons, organised by topic and ranked with the strongest first. User Experience The participant in the discussion sees a screen like this: 
They are given a question by the moderator at the top of the screen and encouraged to follow four steps: - Reflect on the topic
- Make contributions by entering text at the bottom of the screen
- Read and evaluate comments of others using the one-click red triangle to the right of each comment
- Fine tune what others are saying using the elaborate function
Demo A demo of how our system works is available here (flash plugin required): |
