Anna De Liddo

Contested Collective Intelligence: Rationale, Technologies, and a Human-Machine Annotation Study

We propose the concept of Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) as a distinctive subset of the broader Collective Intelligence design space. CCI is relevant to the many organizational contexts in which it is important to work with contested knowledge, for instance, due to different intellectual traditions, competing organizational objectives, information overload or ambiguous environmental signals. The CCI challenge is to design sociotechnical infrastructures to augment such organizational capability. Since documents are often the starting points for contested discourse, and discourse markers provide a powerful cue to the presence of claims, contrasting ideas and argumentation, discourse and rhetoric provide an annotation focus in our approach to CCI. Research in sensemaking, computer-supported discourse and rhetorical text analysis motivate a conceptual framework for the combined human and machine annotation of texts with this specific focus. This conception is explored through two tools: a social-semantic web application for human annotation and knowledge mapping (Cohere), plus the discourse analysis component in a textual analysis software tool (Xerox Incremental Parser: XIP). As a step towards an integrated platform, we report a case study in which a document corpus underwent independent human and machine analysis, providing quantitative and qualitative insight into their respective contributions. A promising finding is that significant contributions were signalled by authors via explicit rhetorical moves, which both human analysts and XIP could readily identify. Since working with contested knowledge is at the heart of CCI, the evidence that automatic detection of contrasting ideas in texts is possible through rhetorical discourse analysis is progress towards the effective use of automatic discourse analysis in the CCI framework.

Managing Knowledge in Urban Planning: Can Memory Support Systems Help?

When dealing with environmental plans, participation is considered crucial but hard work still has to be done in order to make participatory knowledge really operative. Tools and approaches to knowledge management are required that make participatory knowledge, which is produced, shared, and used along the planning action, available to the action itself. Starting from an experience of participatory planning in the context of Torre Guaceto natural Park, authors first reflect on the possible meaning of knowledge management in the planning process; secondly authors envisage the relevance of memory support systems in such processes as means to capture the argumentation chains which, explaining the action, are produced along the action and supporting it. Finally the paper presents the first results of a research project aiming at developing a memory support system dedicated to the Torre Guaceto Park Agency.This paper discusses the case of how Clinical Pathways (CPs) are defined, used and maintained in two hospital settings. We combine a literature review and observational study to illustrate the composite nature of CPs and the different roles they can play in different phases of their life-cycle, with respect to the theme of bridging medical knowledge with the related practices by which physicians deal with a specific care problem. We take the case of the CP as a paradigmatic case to make a point about the urging need of an integrated approach towards the computer-based support of information and knowledge management in rapidly evolving cooperative work settings. 1 Artifacts that Put Knowledge in Practice Knowledge is often operationally defined in terms of a meaningful collection of rules, principles, criteria and informative notions that enable people to interpret a given situation, make decisions, solve problems, communicate and cooperate. Rather than on knowledge itself (whatever it is), this approach leads to focusing on what is usedwhen people have to do with some knowledge, i.e. on the physical artifacts that are created to somehow embed and reifythe knowledge that is externalized for some particular purpose. Indeed, the concept of knowledge artifact (KA) has been introduced to undertake a whole series of studies on how to support knowledge, as well as its creation, sharing and management. That notwithstanding, knowledge artifacts are rarely studied “in action”. This is probably due to the fact that the concept of KA is rarely adopted as a first class concept to describe Cabitza and Simone Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Universit à degli Studi di MilanoBicoccacabitza,simone@disco.unimib.it Sarini Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universit à degli Studi di Milano-Bicoccasarini@unimib.it

Socially augmented argumentation tools: Rationale, design and evaluation of a debate dashboard

Collaborative Computer-Supported Argument Visualization (CCSAV) is a technical methodology that offers support for online collective deliberation over complex dilemmas. As compared with more traditional conversational technologies, like wikis and forums, CCSAV is designed to promote more critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, by using representations that highlight conceptual relationships between contributions, and through computational analytics that assess the structural integrity of the network. However, to date, CCSAV tools have achieved adoption primarily in small-scale educational contexts, and only to a limited degree in real world applications. We hypothesise that by reifying conversations as logical maps to address the shortcomings of chronological streams, CCSAV tools underestimate the importance of participation and interaction in enhancing collaborative knowledge-building. We argue, therefore, that CCSAV platforms should be socially augmented in order to improve their mediation capability. Drawing on Clark and Brennan influential Common Ground theory, we designed a Debate Dashboard, which augmented a CCSAV tool with a set of widgets that deliver meta-information about participants and the interaction process. An empirical study simulating a moderately sized collective deliberation scenario provides evidence that this experimental version outperformed the control version on a range of indicators, including usability, mutual understanding, quality of perceived collaboration, and accuracy of individual decisions. No evidence was found that the addition of the Debate Dashboard impeded the quality of the argumentation or the richness of content.

A debate dashboard to enhance online knowledge sharing

Purpose – In this paper the aim is to present Debate Dashboard, an online collaborative platform designed to support distributed knowledge management and decision making. The platform integrates an argument mapping tool with visual widgets with the objective of enhancing collective sense‐making and mutual understanding as well as to compensate for the costs of mediated communication in virtual collaborative environments.Design/methodology/approach – The design of Debate Dashboard is based on the theory of common ground according to which participants involved in a conversation build mutual understanding thanks to the exchange of different types of feedback. Using the concept of grounding cost, the authors identified several features of the Dashboard supposed to favour mutual understanding and knowledge sharing. Such features have been implemented through six visual widgets selected through a benchmarking of currently available visualization tools.Findings – The paper discusses the limitations and advantag...

Motivating online engagement and debates on energy consumption

Several studies and official reports argue that changing peoples behavior towards energy consumption is a vital part of our fight against climate change. Engaging people into this issue is the first step towards a social change. However, it has been shown that information campaigns and technology alone are insufficient to achieve such engagement. Understanding what motivate people, in which contexts and combinations, and for which individuals, is therefore key to engaging the public more successfully in such crucial debates. This work investigates the role and impact of motivational strategies on promoting engagement in online energy debates. We report our results from running an experiment in the workplace, in which 33 people contributed to an online discussion on reducing energy consumption. A public and tangible feedback of contributions to the online debate, as well as social comparison and competition were analyzed as motivational strategies. Our results point out that engagement goes beyond intrinsic motivation, and that a set of interplaying factors influenced by the social context was found to be the stronger motivational force of engagement.

Using Social Network Analysis to Support Collective Decision-Making Process

Current traditional technologies, while enabling effective knowledge sharing and accumulation, seem to be less supportive of knowledge organization, use and consensus formation, as well as of collaborative decision making process. To address these limitations and thus to better foster collective decision-making around complex and controversial problems, a new family of tools is emerging able to support more structured knowledge representations known as collaborative argument mapping tools. This paper argues that online collaborative argumentation has the rather unique feature of combining knowledge organization with social mapping and that such a combination can provide interesting insights on the social processes activated within a collaborative decision making initiative. In particular, the authors investigate how Social Network Analysis can be used for the analysis of the collective argumentation process to study the structural properties of the concepts and social networks emerging from users’ interaction. Using Cohere, an online platform designed to support collaborative argumentation, some empirical findings obtained from two use cases are presented.

Encouraging collective intelligence for the common good: how do we integrate the disparate pieces?

Largely due to the Internet and the increase in digital network communications worldwide, researchers, community members, activists, and many others are exploring new ways of empowering citizens with systems that promote Collective Intelligence for the Common Good (CI4CG). We define CI4CG as a distinctive type of collective intelligence, which emerges in civic contexts; it is aimed at generating societal good; improving civic engagement; enabling democratic decision making and deliberation; and producing, collectively built and owned, transformative solutions to complex societal challenges. In this workshop we will survey a variety of online tools and discuss what aspects of CI4CG they are intended to address and how they would be used by communities. An important part of the work will be identifying possible approaches towards integrating the tools technologically and socially. We will try to identify frameworks and mechanisms that various systems could leverage.

Collective intelligence as community discourse and action

Collective Intelligence (CI) research investigates the design of infrastructures to enable collectives to think and act intelligently, and intriguingly, more intelligently than individuals. Technologies such as idea management or argumentation tools, blogs, wikis, chats, forums, Q&A sites, and social networks provide unprecedented opportunities for entire communities or organizations to express a discourse and act at a massive scale. This workshop seeks to understand the forms of CI that can be constructed through discourse and action, which enables advanced forms of collective sensemaking such as idea generation and prioritization, argumentation, and deliberation. When does effective discourse help a collective outperform individuals? What functions should the next generation of social platforms support? How can we allow communities to efficiently manage many diverse ideas, argument, and deliberate? What patterns in discourse and action can be modeled computationally?

Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events.

New Ways of Deliberating Online: An Empirical Comparison of Network and Threaded Interfaces for Online Discussion

One of the Web’s most phenomenal impacts has been its capacity to connect and harness the ideas of many people seeking to tackle a problem. Social media appear to have played specific and significant roles in helping communities form and mobilize, even to the level of political uprisings. Nevertheless the online dialogue spaces we see on the Web today are often re-purposed social networks that offer no insight into the logical structure of the ideas, such as the coherence or evidential basis of an argument. This hampers both quality of citizen participation and effective assessment of the public debate. We report on an exploratory study in which we observed users interaction with a new tool for online deliberation and compared network and threaded visualizations of arguments. Results of the study suggest that network visualization of arguments can effectively improve online debate by facilitating higher-level inferences and making the debate more engaging and fun.