olnet.org

Moderated VS Open Deliberation: Hypermedia Technologies to Enhance Public Participation

Anna De Liddo & Simon Buckingham Shum

Knowledge Media Institute Open University, UK

a.deliddo@open.ac.uk ; S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk

ODET 2010: Online Deliberation Emerging Tools Workshop Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation

(Leeds, 30 June–2 July, 2010)

We investigate different aspects and issues of Public Participation in Urban Planning and Decision-Making focusing on the key role of  deliberation practice,  deliberation tracking and  deliberation representation to enable more effective public participation.

Our Approach

We look at Hypermedia discourse technologies to help move us from a deliberation process which is often ephemeral, ill-structured and disempowering, to deliberation which is persistent, more coherent and participatory.

 Improving transparency:

Supporting deliberation capturing and representation By recording deliberation and discourse digitally to make it possible to interrogate later on and use deliberation contents to actively inform decision making

 Empowering Community voices and ideas:

Facilitating Open Public Inquiry and Collective Intelligence By developing a “virtual agora” for open public inquiry on common policy issues

Two Research Strands

olnet.org

Compendium

Two hypermedia tools to support Moderated Vs Open Deliberation

olnet.org

Compendium

Two deliberation Models: Moderated Deliberation VS Open Deliberation

Compendium supports a moderated deliberation model in which a facilitator/mapper interprets deliberations (either live or post-hoc) in order to create hypermedia maps by naming, classifying, linking and summarizing deliberation contents. The mapper is entrusted to create coherent argument maps out of several dialogues and deliberation processes.

Cohere supports an open deliberation model in which issues are created and discussed without pre-defined communication language, without facilitation and in an open deliberation environment. All participants have equal editing privileges, and create together new ideas, raise issues, ask questions, provide answers and propose arguments and counterarguments with an open semantic framework (not necessarily IBIS).

Compendium

Argument Maps vs Dynamic Collective Claims maps

Deliberation result is a discourse arguments map, which is crafted by the information/knowledge manager; who facilitate by  Selecting/Filtering  Structuring  Highlighting  Representating deliberation contents.

Deliberation result is a Collective Claims map, which is a dynamic map of claims cooperatively generated by many hands and watched by many eyes, and continuously changing. This map is structured by an ongoing un-moderated debate and potentially can involve all citizens. It is the dynamic result of an “open virtual agora”.

Compendium

Challenges: Coherence vs Open Participation

On one side moderated argument mapping improves coherence and unambiguity in the message who is communicated.

On the other side it introduces an important level of discretion since the mapper filters what is meant to be relevant to inform decision making.

On one hand enabling the creation of unframed dynamic maps of claims, cooperatively generated, opens up to wider participation, since it lowers usability and cognitive barriers users have to overcome to contribute to the conversation.

On the other hand it hampers coherence and increases noise and ambiguity of what are relevant messages to inform decision-making.

olnet.org

Compendium

For Moderated Deliberation

Social View Exploration Path

Dialogical/Argumentative View

Geographical View of Deliberation contents

Design Rational View backed on deliberation contents

Temporal View of Deliberation contents

Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vthygbKA2Mg

Open Deliberation model

Compendium

Crowdsourcing participation

Creating structure