Schmatic Design of CiNet

This schematic figure describes the general plan for CiNet. It illustrates the CiNet plan.

Here is how the improved CiNet would work through its three basic components:

Registration Module

Community leaders interested in finding a solution to a community problem connects to Community IDEA Net via the national information infrastructure. They enter the CiNet registration module where they first identify themselves as already registered or not or volunteering to provide innovation descriptions directly to the innovation resource. If they are a volunteer then they move onto the module for volunteer registrations.

If they are not registered users, then decide whether to register with CiNet's "user inventory," describing the general nature of the problem along with some basic information about the inquirer. If they do not register then they go onto the section which allows them to make inquiries of CiNet's innovation resource.

If they have already registered or if they register at that moment then CiNet transfers them to the inquiry module through a special presentation evaluation module that presents them with one of three possible screens to test which presentation method is more effective. Any one of these presentations allows them to make inquiries of CiNet's innovation resource.

Response Module

The community leader can then search CiNet's innovation resource for project descriptions which have worked in other cities facing the same or similar problems. The program descriptions describe a city's initial conditions and its goals. The CiNet resource thus provides the community leader with ideas, basic descriptions, and evaluations with sufficient detail to make a preliminary presentation to the town's manager and council. The descriptions also provide "contact information" to facilitate more detailed information from the original source.

At the same time that it is responding to the users' inquiries, CiNet updates these users' inquiry logs keeping track of their requests. These logs are used in the villager response element placing every request in a context of other leaders making similar inquiries or receiving similar responses. And finally, the CiNet response module links the community leader to other users (through CiNet's "community inventory") who have either asked similar questions, identified similar innovations, or come from the same geographic community. Thus, every inquiry generates parrallel responses: one from the innovations resourse responding to the question and one from the user inventory placing the inquiry into a community context.

Evaluation Module

At specified periods, the user inventory will report on those who have used CiNet, breaking them out by the intensity of use. This information is reported to the evaluation module which generates requests of these users for feedback on the service. These evaluation requests will focus on recouping information about the enduse of CiNet responses and about presentation and resource details. These periodic user reviews will accompany a broader, more traditional evaluation using direct mail and telephone surveys.

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