What Is a Forecaster Network?

A forecaster network is a dedicated website where a standing group of people - subject matter experts, staff across your organization, partners, or an external panel - answer forecasting questions your analysts publish to them. It runs on its own domain, carries your name and branding, and is separate from the Hinsley analyst workspace where your team does its research.

A network aggregates expert judgement into numbers you can track over time. You publish a question, forecasters answer with probabilities, and the resulting crowd forecast flows back into the analysis that prompted the question.

The Two Surfaces

Hinsley has two distinct surfaces:

  • The analyst workspace - where your team runs analyses, builds decompositions and scenarios, writes questions, and produces outputs. This is the main Hinsley application.
  • The network site - a separate website on its own domain, where forecasters sign in, answer questions, discuss them, and track their accuracy. Forecasters only ever see this.

A forecaster on your network has no access to your analyses, documents, or draft products. They see the questions that have been published to the network and nothing else. Conversely, analysts who do not hold a seat on the network see it only as observers.

Key Concepts

  • Network - the site itself: a name, a domain, a roster of forecasters, and a set of settings. A single Hinsley account can run more than one network, for example one internal and one for external partners.
  • Forecaster - someone who holds a seat on the network. Forecasters answer questions, write rationales, discuss, and build an accuracy record. Seats are per-network, so the same person can belong to several networks with different settings on each.
  • Request - an ask for a forecast. When an analyst publishes a question to a network, it opens a request round: the question appears in each forecaster's queue and, depending on their preferences, generates an email. Recurring questions open a fresh round on a cadence, re-asking the network as circumstances change.
  • Sponsor - who a question is being asked on behalf of: a department, program office, or client team. The sponsor's name and logo appear on the question and in each forecaster's queue.
  • Topic - a theme used to tag questions. Forecasters filter by topic and declare their expertise per topic, which is used to route requests.
  • Challenge - a page on the network devoted to a body of related questions, usually backed by a sponsor. Challenges are listed in the network sidebar for forecasters to browse.

How Work Flows Through a Network

  1. An analyst writes a forecasting question in the analyst workspace, usually as part of an analysis.
  2. They publish it to a network, choosing the sponsor, topics, and whether to ask once or on a repeating cadence.
  3. Forecasters see the request in their queue and are notified by email at whatever frequency they chose.
  4. They submit a probability and a rationale, discuss with each other, and update their forecasts as the picture changes.
  5. The aggregated crowd forecast appears back in the analyst workspace alongside AI forecasts and any internal estimates.
  6. When the question resolves, every forecaster is scored, and their accuracy record and the network leaderboard update.

Getting a Network

Networks are provisioned by the Cultivate Labs team rather than created from within the app, because each one needs its own domain and mail configuration. Contact us with the network name and the domain you would like it served on, and we will set it up on your account.

Once it exists, account admins can see all of their account's networks under Forecaster Networks in the account administration area, along with each one's domain, status, and participant count. From there, Open site admin takes you straight into that network with your session carried across. Everything else - settings, the roster, invitations, topics, sponsors, moderation - is configured on the network itself.

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