Tools for Supporting Deliberation on Project-Level Issues


Tools for Supporting Deliberation on Project-Level Issues

Presenter Travis Kriplean (University of Washington)
Themes Communities
About the presenter
Travis Kriplean is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he also received his Masters degree in Computer Science in 2007. Prior to moving to Seattle, he received a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, with majors in Computer Science and Sociology. He approaches research from the design-oriented perspective of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). His primary research interest is in understanding and designing technology to support efficacious communication amongst large and often ill-defined groups of people seeking to build consensus on issues of wide concern in a community. He has been doing research in two specific domains where these conditions hold: urban planning (UrbanSim) and collaborative encyclopedia authoring (Wikipedia). A couple of his research papers about the use of policy and the exchange of barnstars in Wikipedia have won awards at a couple top HCI and CSCW academic conferences.
Abstract

Wiki software has proven to be a powerful tool for collaborative content management, and even a decent platform for conversations about the content. However, the software is under provisioned in its support of large, project-level consensus seeking activities. While achieving consensus on hot-button issues is clearly not a fully technical issue, we argue that technology explicitly designed to support, organize and centralize advocacy activities may help Wikimedia communities improve their ability to identify areas of emerging consensus, points of possible compromise, and generally increase the legitimacy of decisions. In this talk, we propose a Wiki-based collaborative pattern for supporting large-scale advocacy, argumentation, and consensus seeking.

Language English
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