Creative Synthesis

This is a preliminary setup for a collaborative web experiment system and economy of knowledge. The idea behind this system is to facilitate the research progress; for example, if a research group is conducting a psychological experiment, instead of having to publicize the study in order to get participants, and then having the participants come to a certain place, and then having the experiment administered to them, the researcher can submit the experiment to an online community of active participants. The experimenter can easily find a number of eligible participants, and also other experimenters looking into similar areas. This system would also provide a way for sharing results and conclusions from each of the experiments. As an incentive for participating in these experiments, each experiment has a certain reward associated with it.

Say you’re a user coming to the site to participate in an experiment. You’d first sign in, and then you’re presented with a selection of the recently submitted experiments, followed by the list of the experiments you’ve submitted, and the list of experiments you’ve participated in. You could pick one of the newly published experiments showcased on the homepage, browse categories of experiments, or view all the experiments.

Once you’ve selected an experiment, you can see there is a short description followed by the requirements, an estimate of how long the experiment will take, and the compensation the participant would receive. Over on the right you can see other users who recently participated in the experiment, comments made, and related experiments. This makes it simpler for users to find experiments similar to those that they’ve already participated in.

There is also a reviewing feature: this allows users to offer suggestions about the experiment and evaluate the contribution, benefit, validity, originality and clarity of the experiment.

Now that you’ve participated in a few experiments, let’s say you want to submit one of your own. You’d simply go to the page to post an experiment, supply the necessary information, and you’re all set.

In the future, before participating in any experiments users would have to go through certain evaluation steps to determine their eligibility in the various experiments; for example, certain studies have certain age, gender or ethnicity restrictions. These evaluations would make sure that the studies get the appropriate participants. After a user participates in a few experiments, the system could recommend other experiments based on their qualifications and the types of experiments they tend to participate in. Researchers could also see what users participated in similar experiments to their own and invite them to take part in theirs.

As you can see, the ease of participating in these experiments along with the reward associated with them would make this something users would want to use, while the diverse user base and simplicity of submitting experiments would make this something invaluable for experimenters.