Can We Exploit Collective Intelligence for Collaborative Deliberation? The Case of the Climate Change Collaboratorium

Abstract

Current open-source/peer-production technologies, such as forums, wikis and blogs, have enabled an unprecedented explosion of global knowledge sharing, but appear to be less successful at enabling collaborative deliberation (i.e. the systematic enumeration, analysis, and selection of solution alternatives) around the complex and controversial challenges, such as climate change, now facing humankind. In this paper, we present a new kind of collaboration platform, based on argumentation theory, which is aimed at addressing this weakness. We present the rationale for its design as well as preliminary results obtained from a first field test with a moderate-sized (200 member) user community.