The goals
The Knowlective project aims to define an approach and a set of tools to help a large, potentially disparate group to think together and reach a common decision on complex issues. We want the decision process to be inclusive, and favour true deliberation. In particular, we aim that:
- The process must scale to a very large number of participants
- Any of the participants may bring new issues and options to the table
- Participants should know when their contribution has been heard
- The process should favour mutual understanding over quick decisions
- Decisions should correspond to a genuine commitment of the parties
- The tool must provide a structured, condensed overview of the main options and their status:
- whether any of the options has been duly considered
- in what measure have some participants declared support for an option
- in what measure have some other participants declared support for objections against an option
Subject to the following constraints and obstacles:
- There might be no initial agreement on goals around a shared issue
- There might never be agreement on goals
- Yet it should be possible to define an appropriate moment to draw provisional conclusions for action
- The number of participants means that no participant can be expected to read all contributions
- Some of the participants may have no initial training in deliberation methods
- Some parts of the arguments may require specialized knowledge that some participants will not have
- Some participants may attempt to hijack or bog down the process with spurious input
- Formulation of some options might not be clear, leading to rounds of reformulation
- Participants may re-examine their support for an option that has been formulated
- Participants may be confused by a high number of subtly different proposals
- The participants may be stop participating if they feel the process is too slow, too demanding, or not progressing
How?
Though there is no magic answer to fit all these requirements, we propose to explore an approach that combines elements of existing informal online discussion platforms (blogs, forums) and more structured approaches to deliberation (IBIS) through collective semantic annotation. Broadly, untrained participants can post unstructured proposals, which more experienced participants could then link to a formal model of the known option. Participants also have the option of simply expressing support for options in the formal model, which should be presented in a clear and synthetic form. Support for options, however, is not given simply as a vote; participants also have the option of expressing their support in the form of contributions they would make to the realization of that option, were it to be agreed upon. (This can also take the form of financial contributions, which would then be treated as a participatory budget.) This should help favour options that parties are committed about. Similarly, commitment against a controversial option should be identified.
This support structure also gives an incentive for experienced participants to analyse unstructured proposals. If the original poster and the experienced participant both agree to link the post to an existing, similar option that the latter champions, this gives added support to the option (or to elements common to two similar options.) In the case of an entirely new option, the task of structuring the proposal could be undertaken by a (group of) disinterested experienced participants, or the inexperienced participant could even ask the experienced ones to help with the formalism in exchange for support.