Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
include: i) inertia deriving from the predominant
use of forums and wikis, ii) the short time window
compared to the learning curve of users with the
new tools, iii) the lack of specific expertise and
motivation of the students on the topic leading to
fast content saturation and inability to explore in-
depth specific subtopics; iv) the use of individual
awards and prizes together with the single autor-
ship rules may have fostered competition over
collaboration; this aspect could explain a certain
level of redundancy in contents, emphasis on
authoring rather than on debating to maximize
individual exposure, fear of being involved into
sub-discussions potential characterized by high-
conflicting evolution.
Other important lessons were learned con-
cerning the moderators and, more generally,
community governance. Moderators played a
crucial role: in an important sense they led the
community. They supported users with comments
and suggestions and, by ensuring a logically-
organized argument map, helped users rapidly
locate the contexts where their piece of knowl-
edge can best be linked. For these reasons it is
crucial to have enough moderators working to
ensure fast certification and timely reorganiza-
tion of the argument map. With the existing data
we can roughly estimate the requisite number
of moderators per users. A cadre of from 2 to 5
moderators (the number varied from day to day
according to their other commitments during
the course of the experiment) was able to more
or less keep up with 180 active authors, but only
by dint of an unsustainably heavy investment of
their time. We estimate that a more realistic time
commitment would require that between 5 and
10% of the active users be moderators.
The aim of the deliberatorium is to support large,
geographically dispersed communities of users
in collective deliberation about complex and con-
troversial issues. The key difference between the
deliberatorium and other large-scale collaboration
tools like forums, blogs, chat rooms, and wikis
is that it supports a logic- rather than time-based
knowledge organization structure, based on argu-
ment maps. In this article we have argued that this
structure makes the deliberatorium a superior tool
for supporting large-scale collective deliberation.
We have also reported some preliminary results of
a first field experiment with a community of about
220 users. To our knowledge the deliberatorium
represents the first argumentation platform to be
applied successfully at this scale. The experiment
permitted us to build what is to our knowledge
one of the largest argument maps ever built, on
a complex topic, over the course of two weeks,
starting with novice users.
Many more lessons almost certainly remain
to be gleaned from the test dataset. The delibera-
torium software recorded essentially every user
interaction with the knowledge base, including
every view or modification or rating of any post,
so we have a complete time-stamped record of
the evolution of the argument map and what the
users did while creating it, a database of over
110,000 distinct events. The results of a thorough
analysis of this data will be presented in future
publications.
The field evaluation was limited in several
i m p o r t a n t w a y s . O n e m a j o r l i m i t a t i o n w a s t h e d i s -
proportionate use of extrinsic incentives (awards
for best participants). It is highly probable that
this, in combination with the single author rule,
fostered competition over collaboration among
users, leading them to focus on authoring rather
than on reading, rating and improving what oth-
ers have authored. This probably encouraged
needless redundancy, low information disclosure,
produced a relatively moderate level of debate,
and did not fully exploit the power of the com-
munity to improve the quality of the posts. One
ConClusion
limitations of this study
In this article we have presented a new mass col-
laboration platform we call the deliberatorium.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search