DATE / TIME:

2017•02•07    14:30 - 16:00

Location:

Guimarães

Abstract

We propose a model and some design choices for building a mass online deliberation (MOD) system, aimed at supporting orderly, fair, inclusive and purposeful participation in decision-making within a very large community. We start with arguing that such a system is a necessary component of any large-scale system aiming at open and direct public participation. We also draw a list of requirements that such a system must satisfy, complemented by another list of preconditions for a productive deliberation to happen, and present the proposed model and technical solutions in detail.

A large-scale deliberation on a given issue, in a given community and at a given time progresses online, and goes through a number of phases, namely:

• preparation (selection and formulation of an issue, selection of experts in the field, advertising campaign, registration of participants),
• ideation (moving and discussing proposals, while the system distributes them into a number of clusters, to arrive at their clustered set),
• consolidation (of common proposals within every individual cluster), and
• reconciliation (of proposals from different clusters, i.e. cluster mergers).

Depending on a given context of use, a final vote may be held either among the deliberants, or within the whole constituency (i.e. in a referendum). Or else, the final proposal(s) is/are submitted to the parliament or another decision-making body.

Speaker

Cyril Velikanov is an EGOV Independent Consultant focused on the e-Democracy field and a member of the Memorial Society NGO from Moscow, Russia.