Incorporating stakeholders’ knowledge in group decision-making

International audienc

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

Improving online deliberation with argument network visualization

Social media are increasingly used to support online debate and facilitate citizens’ engagement in policy and decision-making. Nevertheless the online dialogue spaces we see on the Web today typically provide flat listings of comments, or threads that can be viewed by ‘subject’ line. These are fundamentally chronological views which offer no insight into the logical structure of the ideas, such as the coherence or evidential basis of an argument. This hampers both quality of users’ participation and effective assessment of the state of the debate. We report on an exploratory study in which we observed users interaction with a collective intelligence tool for online deliberation and compared network and threaded visualizations of arguments. We contend that animated argument networks enhance online debate reading when data complexity increases, improve understanding of the argumentation data model and promote users engagement by improving users emotional reactions to the online discussion tool

Cohere: A prototype for contested collective intelligence

This paper presents the rationale for treating Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) as a significant and distinctive dimension of the broader Collective Intelligence design space for organizations. CCI is contrasted with other forms of CI, and building on research in sensemaking, and the modeling of dialogue and debate, we motivate a set of requirements for an ideal CCI platform. We then describe a social, semantic annotation tool called Cohere, which serves as our working prototype of the CCI concept, now being deployed in several communities

Visualizing internetworked argumentation

In this chapter, we outline a project which traces its source of inspiration back to the grand visions of Vannevar Bush (scholarly trails of linked concepts), Doug Engelbart (highly interactive intellectual tools, particularly for argumentation), and Ted Nelson (large scale internet publishing with recognised intellectual property). In essence, we are tackling the age-old question of how to organise distributed, collective knowledge. Specifically, we pose the following question as a foil: In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose, or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure that is ‘native’ to the emerging semantic, collaborative web, enabling more effective dissemination and analysis of ideas

Facilitated hypertext for collective sensemaking: 15 years on from gIBIS

Hypertext research in the mid-1980s on representing argumentation for design rationale (DR) foreshadowed what are now dominant concerns in knowledge management: representing, codifying and manipulating semiformal concepts, the use of formalisms to mediate collective sensemaking, and the construction of group memory. With the benefit of 15 years' hindsight, we can see the failure of so many DR systems to be adopted as symptomatic of the more general problem of fostering new kinds of 'literacy' in real working environments. Pursuing Engelbart's goal of "augmenting human intellect", we describe the Compendium approach to collective sensemaking, which demonstrates the impact that a facilitator can have on the learning and adoption problems that plagued earlier DR systems. We also describe how conventional documents and modelling notations can be morphed into and out of Compendium's 'native hypertext' in order to support other modes of working across diverse communities of practice