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(Gray, 2008; Chi, 2008) while (George, 2008;
Nunamaker Jr. & Deokar 2008) cover ODSS.
Earlier works on GDSSs and distributed
GDSSs are presented in (Turoff & Hiltz, 1982)
and (Turoff
et al
., 1993). These papers already flag
concerns leading to the concept of (large-scale)
social DSSs introduced in (Turoff
et al
. 2002),
as referred above.
SDSSs have received increasing attention,
with the explicit or implicit aim to create tools
for applying and developing human collective
intelligence. (Rodriguez & Steinbock, 2004)
analyzes the problems inherent in representative
decision-making and sketches a social network-
based method for societal-scale decision-making.
This work has been refined and extended with
the concept of expertise domains in (Rodriguez,
2004). (Rodriguez & Steinbock, 2006) attempts the
construction of a unified framework for large-scale
collective decision-making as a “weighted seman-
tic network, generated by individual choices, that
connects humans, domains of expertise, problems
and solutions”. As it seems, the concepts devel-
oped are at the core of the Smartocracy project
described in (Rodriguez
et al.
, 2007).
More recent papers (Watkins & Rodriguez,
2008; Rodriguez & Watkins, 2009) give an over-
view of web-based collective decision-making
systems and a reframing in modern technical terms
of ideas of eighteen's century thinkers (Condorcet,
Paine and Adam Smith) promoting “inalienable
human rights, self-governing republics, and mar-
ket capitalism”.
While Marko Rodriguez and co-workers have
been more focused on mathematical oriented
analysis of mechanisms leading to decisions in
SDSSs, researchers at the Center for Collective
Intelligence, Massachussets Institute of Technol-
ogy (MIT-CCI, 2006), have explored a more
conversational approach. (Klein, 2007) explores
“some of the issues and design options involved
in supporting large-scale on-line argumentation”.
The main idea is to use technologies that allow
visualizing arguments (Kirschner
et al.
, 2003) to
support collaborative decision-making beyond
its usual domain at the scale of groups. (Iandoli
et al
., 2007) presents a “collaboration platform,
based on argumentation theory, which is aimed
at addressing” the weaknesses of technologies,
such as forums, wikis and blogs, as social tools
for decision-making, and reports field tests of
the platform. From a communication oriented
perspective (Takahashi
et al
., 2009) analyzes
“the role of an online community in supporting
and sharing the results of informal improvisation
among Salespeople and employees in a business
development department”. The results reported
by the paper suggest that “an online community
may play an important role both in making visible
information needs and in providing information”
in a way that outperforms established methods of
the formal organization.
While the proposal presented in this chapter
had as first guiding idea the specialization of
the concept of SDSS to fit the characteristics of
organizations, its recognition of conversations'
role in decision-making owes to (Stacey, 2003).
In this topic, Ralph Stacey develops a theory of
organizations based on the idea of these being
complex responsive processes, a term he coined
to distinguish human organizations from 'complex
adaptive processes'. The theory sees conversations
among people (not limited to decision-making) as
the main evolutionary factor of an organization.
structuring A codss:
orgAnizAtionAL doMAins
And decision processes
Mathematically speaking, if an organization has
a set of
m
people then it is possible to conceive
of organizing them in 2
m
subsets of people or
sub-organizations. In practice, only a few of all
these possible subsets will correspond to actual
sub-organizations - the organization itself being
one of them and the largest, i.e., the whole set.
Let a sub-organization and the set of people in it
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