Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the ChAllenge: toWArds
internet-enAbled ColleCtive
intelligenCe
for both organizational scholars and companies
(Gloor, 2006; Raymond, 2001; Tapscott and Wil-
liams, 2006; von Hippel, 2001; von Krogh and
von Hippel, 2006).
However, current technologies, such as forums,
wikis and blogs, while enabling effective informa-
tion sharing and accumulation, appear to be less
supportive of knowledge organization, use and
consensus formation. In particular, little progress
has been made to date in providing virtual com-
munities with suitable tools and mechanisms for
collective decision-making around complex and
controversial problems.
In this article we argue that a new kind of
web-mediated platform is needed in order to
overcome the limitations of current technologies
in this regard and to properly exploit the potential
of collective intelligence on the Internet. We pres-
ent the design for such a platform, which we call
the Deliberatorium, which applies a knowledge
organization and visualization approach based
on argument mapping to help large, diverse, and
geographically-dispersed groups systematically
explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concern-
ing systemic challenges. We will argue that the
argumentation approach, by providing a logical
rather than a time-based debate representation,
and by encouraging evidence-based reasoning
and critical thinking, should significantly reduce
the prevalence of some critical pitfalls (such as
low signal to noise ratios, digression, hidden
assumptions, low information disclosure, and
so on) often faced by traditional technologies
such as forum and wikis, and avoid many of the
pitfalls that lead to deliberation failures in small
scale groups as well.
The article is structured as follows. In the next
section we outline the factors that have a major in-
fluence on group deliberation failures and discuss
the limits faced by current technologies from the
perspective of supporting collective deliberation
around complex systemic problems. In the second
part of the article we outline the design of a large-
scale deliberation platform that we believe can
The spectacular emergence of the Internet has
enabled unprecedented opportunities for large
scale interactions, via email, instant messaging,
news groups, chat rooms, forums, blogs, wikis,
podcasts, and the like. Using such technologies,
it is now feasible to draw together knowledgeable
and interested individuals and huge information
sources on a scale that was impossible a few short
years ago. We believe that it is possible to har-
ness these new potentialities to enable “collective
intelligence”, i.e. the synergistic and cumulative
channeling of the vast human and technical re-
sources now available over the internet (Klein,
Cioffi and Malone, 2007) - to address what we
call “systemic” problems, i.e. highly complex
and widely impactful problems such as climate
change, where the nature of the solution depends
on the problem setting and the level of analysis
(Rosenhead and Mingers, 2001). Reframing the
issue in computational terms, we can say that
such problems have a very large, unexplored
and partially unknown solution space. Through
the contributions of large numbers (up to many
thousands) of knowledgeable users, a virtual
community can enable unprecedented breadth of
exploration of the solution space and, if adequately
motivated and supported, convergence on high-
quality and widely-supported solutions through
collective deliberation.
The successful emergence of on-line peer
production communities, e.g. for Linux and
Wikipedia, seems due to an effective combina-
tion of intelligent collective behavior and Internet
capabilities (Surowiecki, 2004). In a nutshell,
openness, large scale, self-organization and the
support offered by adequate, low-cost technolo-
gies have allowed large groups of users to achieve
outstanding results in knowledge creation, sharing
and accumulation, to the point that such virtual
communities have become a source of inspiration
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