Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
prediction market) or forecasting the success of
new products (Google), but they cannot be used
to deliberate collectively about complex problems
for which no obvious limited set of solutions can
be pre-defined.
The reason for the good performance of pre-
diction markets lies first in the simplicity of the
problems they can deal with (there is a known and
limited set of possible alternatives), and, second,
on the presence of market incentives that motivate
individuals to search for more information and
prefer rational choices. The more informed the
decision makers, the higher the probability that
their majority guess is correct, by virtue of the
well-known Condorcet's Jury theorem. This ap-
pears to represent a major difference with other
on-line collaborative communities, like Wikipedia
or the open-source movement, in which many
different kind of both extrinsic (e.g. being paid)
and intrinsic incentives (reputation, reciprocity,
entertainment, voluntary contributions, etc.) are
at work (Shah, 2006).
Following de Moor and Aakhus (2006),
Klein, Cioffi and Malone (2007) classify on-
line deliberation support technologies into three
groups: sharing, funneling, and issue networking
technologies.
By far the most commonly used technologies,
including wikis, blogs, and discussion forums, are
what we can call
sharing
tools (Jøsang, Ismail and
Boyd, 2007). While such tools have been remark-
ably successful at enabling a global explosion of
idea and knowledge sharing, they face serious
shortcomings. One is the signal-to-noise ratio.
The content captured by such tools, especially
forums, is notorious for often being unsystematic,
repetitive, and of highly variable quality. Sharing
systems do not inherently encourage or enforce
any standard concerning what constitutes valid
argumentation, so postings are often bias- rather
than evidence- or logic-based. A second issue
involves the weakness of sharing-type systems
when applied to controversial topics with many
diverging perspectives, often leading to such
phenomena as forum “flame wars” and wiki “edit
w a r s ”. S h a r i n g t o o l s a r e t h u s i l l - s u i t e d t o i d e n t i f y -
ing a group's consensus on a given issue.
Funneling technologies, which include group
decision support systems, prediction markets,
and e-voting, have proven effective at aggregat-
ing individual opinions to determine the most
widely/strongly held view, but provide little or
no support for identifying what the alternatives
selected among should be, or what their pros and
cons are.
Issue networking tools (also known as argu-
mentation or rationale capture technologies, Kir-
shner, Buckingham Shum and Carr, 2005) fill this
gap by helping groups define networks of
issues
(questions to be answered),
options
(alternative
answers for a question), and
arguments
(statements
that support or detract from some other statement,
see Figure 1). Such tools help make deliberations,
even complex ones, more systematic and complete.
The central role of argument entities encourages
careful critical thinking, by implicitly requiring
that users express the evidence and logic in favor
of the options they prefer. The results are captured
in a compact form that makes it easy to understand
what has been discussed to date and, if desired,
add to it without needless duplication, enabling
increased synergy across group members as well
as cumulativeness across time.
Current issue networking systems do face
some important shortcomings, however. A central
problem is ensuring that people enter their think-
ing as well-formed argument structures - a time
and skill-intensive activity - when the benefits
thereof often accrue mainly to
other
people at
some time in the future. Most issue network-
ing systems have addressed this challenge by
being applied in physically co-located meetings
where a single facilitator captures the free-form
deliberations of the team members in the form
of an commonly-viewable argument map. Issue
networking systems have also been used, to a
lesser extent, to enable non-facilitated delibera-
tions, over the Internet, with physically distributed
Search WWH ::
Custom Search