After collecting lots of input during a Q&A phase in workshops, you'd want to select the items to further discuss in a (breakout) group. And a voting round would help you decide which ones to dive into.
Also, voting gives participants another powerful way of expressing their opinion without the stress of 'speaking up' in a room full of people they don't know yet.
That's where the dot voting method comes in handy. As a facilitator, you give each participant a total number of votes, or 'dots'. They can freely cast them on any of the collected input items, and choose to vote more than once on the same item. The flow is very similar to dot voting in an offline setting.
This article shows you how you can use dot voting in your own online workshop.
1. Setup
Select 'Q&A' as the participation method for the step and room where you want to make use of dot voting. Add one or multiple questions you want participants to share input on.
Select 'Dot voting' as the voting method and define
The 'Purpose of the voting'. This is shown to participants and offers them guidance on how and with what intention they should cast their votes. You can define your own purpose or pick one of the default options.
The 'Votes per participant'. This should be a number between 1 and 10.
2. Start voting
Once the online workshop arrives at the step with dot voting, and once the input has been collected, as the facilitator you can click 'Start dot voting'.
Important: Once you've started the dot voting, no more input can be added.
Once the dot voting has started,
Participants will be able to cast their votes, see the number of remaining votes, and filter on the items they have voted on. They won't see others' votes.
The facilitator will be able to do all the above, while also keeping track of how many participants started voting and how many votes have been cast so far. This information helps you to understand when people are struggling with this method, and when it's a good time to end the voting.
3. End voting
When everyone had a chance to vote, you can click 'End voting'. Doing so will show the voting results to all participants. As a facilitator, you can choose to sort the voting results by the total number of votes or by the total number of participants who voted.
After discussing the results, you can take one of the following actions
Move to the next question;
Move to the next step;
(Restart the dot voting, which will erase all previous votes).
If the next step uses the 'Summarize discussion' participation method, the dot voting results will be shown there as well, to help the group write a summary of the discussion.
That's all! Try it out for yourself and let us know how it goes.