Reasoning for Change A Structured and Decentralised Discussion System for Distributed Decision Making|
bcause is an ambitious research project funded by the Office of Naval Research of the US which aims at devising the next generation of technological solutions for discussion-enhanced collective intelligence and online deliberation.
Deliberation is the careful discussion before decision, and it can be defined as the thorough dialogical assessment of the reasons for and against a measure before a decision is made. When teams are geographically distributed, decision making is made more difficult by the fact that these thorough conversations cannot happen face-to-face, with people sitting in the same room. Deliberation is therefore carried out online, with social media and online discussion technologies, that are generally limited in features, are not designed to support decision making, and often produce polarisation, division and conflict.
We have the potential to do much better by developing new online discussion systems that are designed to be accessible, decentralised, and to enable effective deliberation and decision making.
To transcend these limitations, the bcause project will develop a powerful new tool (bcause.app) for enabling accessible, structured and decentralised deliberation, and then evaluate it in a series of controlled and practical experiments.
We propose an approach that combines three main innovations:
bcause.app will result in an online discussion technology that is equally accessible but higher quality than common social media, in that it provides an analytic engine to identify and intervene on emerging bias and improve the overall quality of the communication.
The bcause.app discussion environment will also provide a secure space for online communication; in that it will use anonymous reputation protocols to promote privacy and decentralisation of dialogue data while at the same time incentivising accountable discussion.
Finally, the new online discussion technology also will enable better informed participation, by providing automated reporting and interactive visualisations to help people making sense, summarise and communicate the state, progress and dynamics of an online debate.
