Convergence is a collaborative activity in which members of group focus on what they consider the most promising or important contributions resulting from an ideation activity. Convergence is critical in helping a group focus their efforts on issues that are worthy of further attention. In the current study, we further research in this area by exploring and characterizing the effects of a particular convergence intervention, the FastFocus technique, in the context of a crowdsourcing project. We conducted an exploratory case study of artifacts generated by a crowd of managers addressing a real problem identification and clarification task in a large financial services organization. Using an online crowdsourcing tool, a professional facilitator led participants during preset periods through a convergence activity that focused on the brainstorming contributions that had been generated prior. To better understand the effects of the convergence technique on the group’s ideas, we compared the raw problem statements to the final output of the convergence activities in terms of the number of unique ideas present, as well as the ambiguity of the ideas. Using the FastFocus convergence technique reduced the number of concepts by 76%. Ambiguity was reduced from 45% in the set of problem statements to 3% in the converged set of problem statements. We demonstrate with these findings that the outcomes of group convergence processes in real settings can be measured, enabling future research which seeks to evaluate and understand convergence in groups. Aspects of brainstorming instructions were also identified that may make it possible to reduce the ambiguity of problem statements.

融合是一种协作活动，小组成员专注于他们认为的构想活动带来的最有希望或最重要的贡献。融合对于帮助团队将精力集中在值得进一步关注的问题上至关重要。在当前的研究中，我们通过在众包项目的背景下探索和表征特定的融合干预（FastFocus技术）的效果来对该领域进行进一步研究。我们对由大型管理人员解决的大型金融服务组织中的实际问题识别和澄清任务产生的工件进行了探索性案例研究。使用在线众包工具，一位专业的主持人在预先设定的时间段内带领参与者进行一项融合活动，重点是先前产生的集思广益贡献。为了更好地理解融合技术对小组构想的影响，我们根据存在的独特构想的数量以及构想的含糊性，将原始问题陈述与融合活动的最终输出进行了比较。使用FastFocus收敛技术将概念数量减少了76％。歧义从问题陈述集中的45％减少到融合问题陈述集中的3％。我们用这些发现证明，可以测量实际环境中的群体融合过程的结果，从而可以开展旨在评估和理解群体融合的未来研究。