Enabling Deliberations in a Political Party Using Large-Scale Argumentation: A Preliminary Report

Humanity now finds itself faced with a range of highly complex and controversial challenges - such as climate change, the spread of disease, international security, scientific collaborations, product development, and so on- that call upon us to bring together large numbers of experts and stakeholders to deliberate collectively on a global scale. Collocated meetings can however be impractically expensive and are prone to serious dysfunctions, especially at large scales. Social media such as email, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and web forums provide unprecedented opportunities for interacting on a massive scale, but typically generate vast, poorly-organized, unsystematic and highly redundant corpuses of widely varying quality. Argumentation systems represent a promising approach for addressing these challenges, by virtue of providing a simple systematic structure that radically reduces redundancy and encourages clarity, but these have been used almost exclusively for small-scale deliberations. This paper represents a preliminary report on using an argumentation system to enable largescale deliberations, involving over 400 members of the Italian Democratic Party, on electoral law reform. It is, to our knowledge, one of very few evaluations of large-scale argumentation, as well as the first to include a systematic comparison with conventional (web forum based) online.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Contributo in atti di convegno
Author or Creator: 
Mark Klein
Paolo Spada
Raffaele Calabretta
Publisher: 
European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET), Siegen, DEU
Source: 
10th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems From research to practice: Results and open challenges. ,, Marseille, May 29, 2012
Date: 
2012
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/188259
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263307756_Enabling_Deliberations_in_a_Political_Party_Using_Large-Scale_Argumentation_A_Preliminary_Reports
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Raffaele Calabretta