A new Special Interest Group on Online Deliberation will be launched this 22 of April 2015!
Online Deliberation (OD) is an important and increasingly common Internet phenomenon that has drawn attention from researchers in various disciplines. A series of events, projects and workshops have been convened by organizers of this SIG. From 2003-2010 there were four International Conferences on Online Deliberation [1]. Over the past five years, gatherings have moved to workshops hosted by conferences in specialized – although interdisciplinary – areas such as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (e.g., ACM CSCW 2012 [2], COOP 2012, Communities and Technologies 2013 [3]); Social, Political and Media Communication [4]; Collective Intelligence, Sensemaking, and Computer-Supported Argumentation [5, 6]; and Natural Language Processing [7]). Examples of recent studies of large-scale deliberation emerged from these workshops can be found in a 2015 journal issue [8].
The trend toward fragmentation across specialized areas partly reflects the difficulties encountered in the early attempts to bring researchers from many disciplines together. The fundamental assumptions (such as the meaning of “deliberation”) differ particularly across the computer science and social science communities. Nonetheless, the problem of designing deliberative processes and technologies remains inherently interdisciplinary. The goal of this SIG meeting is to map these connections and set the research landscape for the HCI community to study and design online deliberative processes and technologies.
This SIG meeting will help bring together a diversity of researchers and practitioners and lay common ground for the definition and organization of research and design for online deliberative processes and technologies.
We expect to
- provide more rigorous definitions of the topics under scrutiny in relation to existing theories, methods, and technologies (e.g., to set criteria for “good” online deliberation to guide design);
- map the space of design problems and promising solutions relevant to researchers and practitioners developing online deliberation technologies; and
- identify horizontal challenges, and the strategies to approach them, when studying and designing online deliberation (e.g. licenses, formalizing, gamification, visualization).
After the SIG meeting, we will continue to build a multidisciplinary network for studying and designing technology-mediated deliberation (e.g., build an email list, open a Facebook group, dedicate a website to the community, organize regular workshops, publish special issues and books, promote collaborations on grants and projects, and generate patents and commercial products). We anticipate that the fostered communication and collaboration among researchers will promote more awareness of research and practice from different domains, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the design and evaluation of deliberation technologies.
CHI2015 SIG panel at CHI2015!
If you are interested in joining the offline discussion on April 22, 2015 (11:30am to 12:50pm, Room 318A, Seoul COEX convention center), please sign up here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1al8wyvWztw3EjN3DlaShG6Pf5JSYPCEomTmd-im7f6w/viewform?usp=send_form
If you are not able to make to the offline discussion, you are welcome to visit our online community and join our ongoing deliberation on the research field. In this website, you will be able to contribute to different threads of discussions, vote for those issues that interest you the most, as well as sign up for an online discussion that will happen in parallel to the actual offline discussion.
http://deliberatorium.mit.edu/signup?E-1O3FEEL-6
Here are the links to the two video tutorials on:
1) How to access the Deliberatorium: http://www.screencast.com/t/YghqPsS4fliH
2) How to contribute to a deliberation map: http://www.screencast.com/t/Ey0l8Q9V
We look forward to meeting you both online and offline!
The SIG Organization Committee
Lu Xiao (The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Weiyu Zhang (Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore)
Anna Przybylska (Center for Deliberation, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Poland)
Anna De Liddo (The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom)
Gregorio Convertino (Informatica Corporation, Redwood City, United States)
Todd Davies (Stanford University, United States)
Mark Klein (MIT, Cambridge, United States)
Organizers of the SIG meeting
The seven organizers truly represent the multidisciplinary and international nature of the SIG. We are from the US, Canada, Poland, Singapore, and the UK. Four of us are from the HCI community, and three from the communication discipline. Six of us are from academia and one is from industry. Four were co-organizers of previous workshops on ideation and deliberation systems at various venues such as CSCW, COOP, and C&T. These characteristics of the organizing team imply that SIG attendees will benefit from a well-balanced set of topics and a broad range of research experiences and perspectives. Specifically:
Lu Xiao is an information scientist with a keen research interest on the role of the shared rationales in online deliberations, and technologies to support rationale extraction, rationale articulation and reuse.
Weiyu Zhang is a communication scholar interested in exploring the connections between technological innovations and deliberative processes.
Anna Przybylska is a programme manager of the Centre for Deliberation at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw; and a manager of an applied project “New perspectives for dialogue: The model of deliberation and ICT tools in decision-making processes” financed by the National Centre for Research and Development within the Social Innovations Programme.
Gregorio Convertino is Senior User Research at Informatica, co-editor of a recent special issue “Large-Scale Ideation and Deliberation: Tools and Studies in Organizations” in the journal of Social Media in Organizations. Also a co-editor of the special issue,
Anna De Liddo is a Research Fellow in collective intelligence infrastructures and has an interest in knowledge construction through discourse, and the role of technology in scaffolding dialogue and argumentation in contested domains.
Todd Davies co-edited the book Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice (2009). His research lies in the intersections of cognition, computation, deliberation, decision-making, and informatics.
Mark Klein is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and led the development of The Deliberatorium, a platform that enables online large-scale deliberation.
References
[1] Online Deliberation Resources. http://online-deliberation.net
[2] Collective Intelligence as Community Discourse and Action: Conferences & Talks. www.parc.com/ciorg
[3] Large Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems at C&T 2013. http://www.gi2mo.org/2013/
[4] Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation. http://www.od2010.di.unimi.it/
[5] The First Essence09 Workshop. http://events.kmi.open.ac.uk/essence/index.html
[6] ODET 2010: Online Deliberation Emerging Tools. http://www.olnet.org/odet2010
[7] First Workshop on Argumentation Mining. http://www.uncg.edu/cmp/ArgMining2014/
[8] Large-Scale Ideation and Deliberation: Tools and Studies in Organizations. https://www.mitre.org/jsmo
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