OpenideaL (OI) is an online ideas and innovation management system (IDMS) intended for organizations who wish to share with their clients strategic decisions and planification of future products and services. it serves as a tool for the clients community, for expressing their opinions and discussing around them.

“Clients”, in the scope of OI, may be the customers of a commercial entity, citizens of a municipality and also employees in an corporate application.

The objective of the discussion is usually an idea which the clients are interested in its implementation by the organization. These ideas may be, for example, the development of a new product, addressing a customers sector with special needs, policy decisions etc. In fact, the ideas can be just about anything the clients may expect and hope for from the organization.

OI includes tools for the website managers which allow them to identify successful ideas (those ideas which have a better chance to become popular applications or products), and to pass them along to professional teams within the organization. Community members receive points for activity within the website, and can gain more points if their ideas become popular, or if they participate in “hot” discussions.  This allows to reward active community members, and encourages them to lead discussions.

The system also includes smart options of merging similar ideas, or focusing a discussion on a matter which interests the organization more than others.

OI is based on Drupal, and therefore it is modular, and allows growth and adaptation to the organization’s specific needs. These adaptations may include a unique design, polls and surveys, interfacing with external applications such as Facebook or to applications within the organization itself, and adapting the interface to a range of devices:phones, desktops, tablets or kiosks.

Main advantages of OpenideaL

Possible extensions

Strengthening customer engagement by creating an active community

Identifying new markets by the clients themselves

Allowing client to express and channel their “steam” to positive places

Ability to respond quickly to trends and campaigns

Unique design

Facebook application

Mobile apps

internal systems interoperability (e.g. CRM)

Video ideas and comments

Newsletter

OpenideaL - What's in the box?

Basic components

• Add a new idea - a form for creating new ideas, includes: title, description, category. The form has a built-in mechanism to present similar ideas while typing, to reduce similar/duplicate ideas.
• Idea page - Displays ideas with: creation date, author, category, voting widget, no. of comments.
• Idea edit - Allows site administrator to edit all of the idea details. In addition it allows applying a “process status”, marking it as an idea worth checking, block additional comments, unpublishing the idea or removing it completely.
• Comments display - Comments form + all previous forms
• Ideas tagging - Allows addition of tags from a predetermined list, editable by site admin.
• “Worth checking out” - This is a mechanism to determine the level of activity around ideas, using an algorithm which weighs in the number of comments, number of votes, and the time passed since the last activity. The “Worth checking out” component helps the analysts to determine which ideas are the more successful ones.
• Notifications - A member in the website can manage a list of prefered ideas, and subscribe to notifications from the website. In addition, the user can receive updates on latest activity in the user’s own ideas.
• Voting - Displays the number of votes and allows a +/- (up-down) vote on each idea. Each member can vote one time on each idea.
• User points - For each activity on the website (adding an idea, commenting, voting) the user earns points. The number of points for each action is configurable.
• Abuse / Inappropriate content - Any content/comment/user can be flagged as inappropriate. When a configurable threshold of reports has been reached, the site manager receives a notice, and is able to approve/disapprove it, block a user, or close the discussion for further comments and votes.
• Share - Share ideas to Facebook and Twitter.
• RSS - Export ideas as RSS
• FAQ - Displays Questions and Answers on the same page.
• Blog / News 
• Anti-Spam - Currently using Mollom
• Activity log - Displays the recent activity of members
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Pages

• Home page
• Registration page
• Log-in page
• Idea creation page
• Idea page together with it’s comments
• Tag page - displays ideas by tags (categories)
• Popular ideas page - displays ideas sorted by popularity
• Last ideas page - displays ideas sorted by chronological order
• In-process ideas page - displays ideas which have been promoted to any status (by site managers) and enables filtering by status
• Launched ideas page - displays ideas which have completed the chain of statuses and are considered “Launched” (end of the life cycle of an idea).
• User profile page - Displays the user name and the user’s ideas.
• My page - Displays my name, my ideas list, ideas to which I contributed (voted, commented). Also contains general operations such as Edit profile, password, subscribe to notifications etc.
• Ideas and members search page - Also displays popular search phrases

Optional Components

Featured ideas - Manually selected by the site manager

Community leaders - Displays members with the highest number of points

Head to head - Features 2 selected ideas, and ask users to vote for one of them

Challenge - Allows creation of a categorized container, to which ideas can be added.

Ideas added to a challenge, are automatically tagged with the same category.

The Challenge page displays all of it’s ideas together with an idea creation form.

Only one challenge is active at any given time

A special block is available to display the current active challenge with a quick idea creation form.

Challenges are a great way to focus users on a certain subject and quickly collect many ideas for it.

Management & Control

Analysis control panel enables filtering the information in various ways, and create nice visual graphs.

Find and Merge similar ideas

Control the variables in the pointing algorithm