COLLAGREE : Facilitator-mediated Large-scale Consensus Support System

Internet-based direct democratic discussion has received much attention and will probably be one of the next generation methods for open and public citizen forums. Such forums require systematic methodologies that can efficiently achieve consensuses, reasonably integrate ideas, and avoid flaming. We developed an open web-based forum system called COLLAGREE that has facilitator support functions and deployed it for an internet-based town meeting in Nagoya, Japan as a city project led by its mayor. COLLAGREE is derived from COLLective or COLLaborative and AGREEment. This abstract shows its implementation and preliminary results about an actual field experiment in a city project. The following representative projects inspired us to enter this area. Climate CoLab [Introne et al. 2011][Malone et al. 2009] [Malone and Klein 2007] is one of the most well-known, web-based collective intelligence projects. Its goal is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world to address global climate change. Like Wikipedia and Linux, MIT CCI has developed a crowdsourcing platform where citizens work with experts to create, analyze, and select detailed proposals about climate change. This system is comprised of the following steps: proposal creation, finalist selection, proposal revisions, voting, and presentations to potential implementers to integrate innovative opinions to crystalize implementable ideas. Deliveratorium [Gurkan et al. 2010] [Landoli and Klein 2007] [Klein 2007] is another project where people submit ideas by argumentation maps, which are a discussion structure through which people shape their ideas. With structured argumentation maps, deliveratorium clearly shows all the relations among ideas and opinions. Such structuring can be done even when the opinions are completely divided. In COLLAGREE, people can submit their opinions as a chunk of text as in ordinary forums on Facebook or Twitter, and facilitators can submit their own instruction messages to participants. We believe that people are more used to submitting just messages. Also, theoretically no voting can make democratic decisions under some assumptions. In practice, persuading people by voting is not easy. Thus, we want discussions that can be adequately led by facilitators so that many people can be persuaded to accept the final decision. In fact, real-world workshops or town meetings among citizens are usually coordinated by a facilitator who coordinates, leads, integrates, classifies, and summarizes discussions to reach good consensuses or alternatives. The main issue is how to support facilitators so that they can manage large-scale discussions. In our experiment, professional facilitators joined our project to harness internet discussions with over 100 people. COLLAGREE provides support functions for facilitators. For example, using text-based sentiment analysis [Turney 2002], our system automatically judges the degree of agreement on one message. This project was a collaborative effort among the following interdisciplinary research groups: a city planning division, a design/architecture division, and a computer science division. The city planning division created a role to collaborate with Nagoya. The design/architecture division provided a very ef-