Enabling On-Line Deliberation and Collective Decision-Making through Large-Scale Argumentation - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 242

Figure 2. Components for the design of an on line virtual community

Incentives Mission

Attract
motivate

Attract
motivate

Voluntary members

deliberation

provide

attention

produce

Exploration Convergence

decisions

knowledge

provide
organize
rate

knowledge sharing and creation, consensus
achievement acting under suitable incen-
tives

• participation goverance involves attracting,

retaining, and motivating a critical mass of
users with the right skills

• a set of processes through which members

explore the solution space and converge to
a decision

• attention governance involves mediating

how that community explores the design
and decision space when at work

• rules governing the access to the commu-

nityand proper interaction roles charged
with certain responsibilities.

• community governance involves the defi-

nition of the organizational structure and
processes in terms of hierarchy, rules and
incentives

There are many differences between an on-line
virtual community and a traditional organiza-
tion. First, in the virtual community interaction
happens mainly or solely through the internet
medium; second, individual contribution is mainly
voluntary and limited to three forms: knowledge
provision, knowledge rating, and knowledge
organization (e.g. classification). Third, a virtual
community is a self-organized system in which
top-down management and centralization are
present to only a very limited extent and to which
people join on a voluntary basis, propose and
share ideas, form spontaneous teams and proceed
to achieve goals pursuing recognition from the
outside world (Gloor, 2007). In order for this kind
of organizations to work properly, three major
governance problems have to be dealt with:

In the following we address these three prob-
lems in the context of designing an argument
based platform.

the on-line Argumentation Process

The platform is aimed at supporting an on-line
collective argumentative debate: ideas submitted
by users are supported and attacked by arguments
through a dynamic debate whose aim is to un-
cover chains of pros and cons behind each ideas.
Knowledge is structured and organized through
argument mapping and visualization (Figure 3).
Ideas and arguments are rated by users through
voting. It is important to distinguish between the
voting process and the way scores are expressed,
computed and aggregated. The idea is to have
three types of scores: argument scores (where