ThinkTank for Education

The Challenge 

Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco invited several hundred residents to participate in an event called SF Listens, hosted at San Francisco State University.  Mayor Newsom and his staff wanted to provide residents with an opportunity to give feedback about his budget plans.

During the first part of the SF Listens event, organizers wanted to collect the participants’ ideas about nine major topic areas, such as Homelessness, Housing, Public Safety, and Transportation.  A core team would then need a way to sort and code the data before creating an interactive presentation for an electronic Town Hall meeting. During this meeting participants would get a chance to vote on the different budget plans using audience response systems.

“The Group Systems software proved to be an effective platform for quickly organizing the tremendous volume of data collected during the SF Listens focus groups.”  Dr. John Rogers, Public Research Institute, San Francisco State University

The Group Systems Collaborative Solution

The Public Research Institute (PRI) at SFSU worked with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office to find almost 400 participants and over 100 volunteers for the event.

For the first part of the SF Listens event, the hundreds of participants were broken into tables of ten people. Each table also had a facilitator, who conducted the group discussions, and a notetaker, who typed each individual idea on one of sixty laptops loaned to SFSU by Apple Computer. These ideas went directly into a web-based database created by Academic Technology staff at SFSU.
Over twenty people from PRI, SFSU, and the Mayor’s Office used GroupSystems running on IBM laptops in the SFSU Collaboratory to conduct a complex sorting and coding process:

1. The first tier coders took each individual idea from the database and put it into GroupSystems. Using the Categorizer functionality of GroupSystems, they were able to quickly sort over 4000 different ideas.
2. The second tier coders then used the GS Merge Idea function to cluster similar concepts and to keep a count of the number of people who made specific suggestions about the Mayor’s budget.
3. The third tier coders used this data to construct nine different interactive presentations for the afternoon session.
   At the electronic Town Hall meeting, Mayor Newsom and an SFSU faculty member conducted interactive presentations, where participants used audience response systems to vote on the different budget ideas and suggestions given during the morning session.

Benefits

1. GroupSystems and IBM laptops made it possible to sort and code over 4000 ideas in time for the electronic Town Hall meeting after lunch–a period of only three hours!
2. PRI was able to use the GroupSystems reports to analyze the huge amount of data to debrief the Mayor’s Office and to plan for future events.
3. The San Francisco Mayor’s Office expressed a great deal of pleasure regarding how well the event went. The Mayor’s Office staff indicated that they would like to work with SFSU and PRI again for similar events.