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Figure 3. An example of an on-line argument maps
users vote how well grounded and convincing
an argument is), idea scores (where users rate
how promising and high-impact an idea is), and
author scores (where users vote for the reputation
of an author).
Voting can take place either in a “direct
democracy” scenario, i.e. where all users are al-
lowed to participate in the deliberation process
without intermediation/delegation, or through
proxy democracy. A pure direct democracy ap-
proach has several shortcomings: first, not all
people who express their preferences will be ad-
equately knowledgeable about the specific topic;
second, a high number of participants could post
too many arguments and ideas of poor quality,
producing a fragmented, low quality debate. A
proxy democracy solution with some degree of
moderation has, indeed, proved successful in some
large-scale implementations (see the Slashdot.org
meta-moderators system described in Jøsang et al.,
2007 or the proxy-voting in smartocracy.org).
In both cases it will be important to ensure
the presence of a positive feedback between au-
thor reputation, idea and argument quality. For
instance, suppose one voter likes the idea “sup-
port the implementation of a hydrogen economy”
so that s/he wants to vote for it to increase the
idea score. A possible option is to have a rigid
scoring method ensuring that if the idea is not
adequately supported by good arguments this and
other votes should not affect significantly the idea
score. Alternatively, a softer rule could be for the
system to simply make it clear, through analysis
tools, when people have voted for ideas that don't
have strong logical support: this will hopefully
encourage them to look at the argument structure,
but without imposing a kind of automatic censor-
ing process that many users may rebel against.
Whichever the way, voters and authors will look
at the available arguments. The following cases
are possible:
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