Enabling On-Line Deliberation and Collective Decision-Making through Large-Scale Argumentation - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 241

Figure 1. An example of argument map

participants (Buckingham Shum, 2006; Verheij,
2003). With only one exception that we know of 1 ,
however, the scale of use has been small, with on
the order of 10 participants or so working together
on any given task, far less than what is implied
by the vision of large-scale collective intelligence
introduced in this article.
Since the set up and large scale testing of a
collaborative deliberation platform requires con-
siderable effort and higher costs than a traditional
experiment with a small group, the risk of ex-post
deliberation failure should be reduced by suitable
pre-emptive countermeasures. In the next section
we present an approach to the design of an on-
line argumentation collaborative platform and
propose several implementation solutions aimed
at ensuring effective deliberation. The proposed
approach is centered around argumentation: we
claim that an argument-based format for knowl-
edge representation and a deliberation process
developing through a debate characterized by
a dynamic exchange of arguments can improve
deliberation performances compared to those
obtained by small, physically co-located groups
and enhance deliberation performance in the

solution of complex problems compared to other
more traditional internet collaborative technolo-
gies such as forums, wikis and blogs.

the design oF A lArge sCAle
ArgumentAtion Community

the Proposed Framework

One possible way to cope with the complexity
arising in large scale on-line deliberation is to
move from the issue of designing a platform to the
more general problem of organizational design. In
other words, we need to figure out how the virtual
community will (and should) work. We can model
the virtual community as a kind of organization
characterized by (Figure 2):

• a mission to realize

• one or more goals coherent with the mis-

sion

• a large group of participants offering portions

of their time and attention to the achieve-
ment of the goal through information search,