ABSTRACT
We now come to the first of our four ‘research frontier’ packages-CyberQuest. This system is useful during the ‘think’ phase of the policymaking process because it is electronic brainstorming software. Yet it is an advance on other brainstorming packages because of its thoroughness, its ease of use and, most of all, because of its ‘multi media’ attributes. That is, because the whole idea of brainstorming is to stimulate users’ creativity using whatever means possible (Van Grundy, 1985), CyberQuest enlists the support of many stimuli, including videos, music, sound, pictures, paintings, proverbs, thesauri and even (descriptions of) smells. This is over and above the usual matching of key words with databases, as performed by IdeaFisher and other more standard packages introduced in Chapter 2.
