Information markets are typically used as prediction tools, aggregating opinions about the likelihood of future events, or as preference indicators, identifying participants' product preferences. However, the basic information market concept is more widely applicable. In our experiment, we utilized information markets within the domains of idea generation and group decisioning. Participants were allowed to propose ideas regarding potential technology research areas; these ideas were represented as securities on a virtual financial market. Participants were able to trade shares of technology ideas over the course of 3 weeks, resulting in the market identifying the "best" idea as the highest priced security. Our findings suggest that information markets for idea generation result in more ideas and more participants than traditional idea generation techniques; however, using markets to rank ideas may be no better than other methods of idea ranking. Additional benefits include providing immediate feedback, allowing visibility of all ideas to all contributors, and being a fun mechanism for consensus building.

We present the outcome of an idea market run for one of GE Energy's sub-businesses in July and August of 2006.  GE Energy used this market to elicit and rank-order technology and product ideas from across the sub-business. In this experiment, we examine the behavior of traders that have submitted the ideas on the market and their influence on the market's outcome. An idea’s submitter is clearly motivated to have his idea valued highly by the market, both by the funding given to the top idea as well as smaller prizes given to the top three ideas. In general, founders tended to buy their suggested ideas at prices above the volume-weighted-average-price (VWAP) in significant volumes. We discuss the implications and mitigation strategies. A survey of market participants yielded mixed results regarding the market's effectiveness at ranking ideas but very positive results regarding the quality of ideas proposed.

The need to manage large information repositories in a secure, distributed environment increases with the growth of the Internet. To address this need, a system capable of managing the contents of an LDAP directory over the Web has been designed and developed. This system allows for the directory's data to be divided into communities and supports the delegation of administrative authority over those communities to a distributed set of administrators. The communities may be subdivided recursively into subgroups, and rights over those subgroups also may be restricted. Thus, system administrators can dynamically delegate subsets of their permissions over a subset of their managed data, allowing for the flexible and effective control of permissions over the data within distributed organizations. The system solves the delegated administration problem for managing the contents of an LDAP directory in a distributed environment. Today, it supports the administration of over 20 production directories by well over 2000 distributed administrators.