Mercyhurst grad student, Sam Rosenthal, recently accepted my challenge to build a tool that had all (or most) of the features of the famous PARC 2.0.5 desktop software for doing Analysis Of Competing Hypotheses in a Google spreadsheet. You can see what it looks like below and make a copy of the template for yourself by clicking on the picture.
Richards Heuer's method is widely taught but, despite several attempts, no one (to my knowledge) has ever succeeded in creating an ACH tool that made collaboration easy ("Easy" being the operative word here). The Google suite of tools, including Google Docs and Sheets, has solved much of the collaboration problem, though. Up to 50 people (!) can work on a single document simultaneously.
Having done this with as many 20 people, I can tell you that it is a pretty trippy experience. Documents don't so much "get written" as "grow" when you have this many people writing and editing and formatting at once. Everyone who participates in one of these massively multi-writer online experiences (MMOEs?) comes away amazed at how fast the process is and how analytically solid the final products turn out to be.
As good as this tool is, there are still some limitations. First, it is a Google product and comes with all the usual baggage, caveats and idiosyncrasies of any Google product. Second, to add more evidence or hypotheses you will have to cut and paste empty rows or columns. Also, while many people can work on the spreadsheet at once, there is no way (yet!) to capture, aggregate and display the level of consistency or inconsistency with any given piece of evidence based on input from multiple users (other than using an analytic modifier such as Nominal Group Technique to come up with a collective answer for each piece of evidence). Sam is working on integrating Google Forms into the spreadsheet such that this becomes a possibility. He hasn't yet figured out how to make days last 28 hours, though, so I don't know when we can expect this update.
Instructions for saving a copy of the spreadsheet:
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people will be looking at this spreadsheet over the next few days. DON'T start playing around with it until you make a copy! Click on the picture or link above and, when the spreadsheet opens up, go to the "File" tab on the spreadsheet (top left) and click on it. Then click on the "Make a Copy" link. This will let you make a copy to your personal account so you can play with it as much as you want.
Finally, don't hesitate to share but just give Sam credit for the good work!
