Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 17
Enabling On-Line Deliberation
and Collective Decision-Making
through Large-Scale
Argumentation:
A New Approach to the Design of an
Internet-Based Mass Collaboration Platform
Luca Iandoli
University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Mark Klein
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Giuseppe Zollo
University of Naples Federico II, Italy
AbstrACt
The successful emergence of on-line communities, such as open source software and Wikipedia, seems
due to an effective combination of intelligent collective behavior and internet capabilities However, cur-
rent internet technologies, such as forum, wikis and blogs appear to be less supportive for knowledge
organization and consensus formation. In particular very few attempts have been done to support large,
diverse, and geographically dispersed groups to systematically explore and come to decisions concern-
ing complex and controversial systemic challenges. In order to overcome the limitations of current
collaborative technologies, in this article, we present a new large-scale collaborative platform based
on argumentation mapping. To date argumentation mapping has been effectively used for small-scale,
co-located groups. The main research questions this work faces are: can argumentation scale? Will
large-scale argumentation outperform current collaborative technologies in collective problem solving
and deliberation? We present some preliminary results obtained from a first field test of an argumenta-
tion platform with a moderate-sized (few hundred) users community.
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