Collective Intelligence and Online Deliberation Platforms for Citizen Engagement and Social Innovation

Abstract

Social media are increasingly used to support online debate and facilitate citizens’ engagement in policy and decision-making. Nevertheless the online dialogue spaces we see on the Web today typically provide flat listings of comments, or threads that can be viewed by ‘subject’ line. These are fundamentally chronological views which 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 citizens’ participation and effective assessment of the state of the debate.

Within the landscape of existing community debate and ideation tools, the talk will introduce a new class of emerging online deliberation platforms – coming from research on Hypermedia, Collective Intelligence and Argumentation – that enable more structured, engaging and transparent online deliberation processes.

The talk will focus on the description of some of these technologies and summarise research studies in which they have been used to effectively support online deliberation in the Education, Healthcare and Public sector.

The talk will conclude proposing reflections and future research on collective intelligence and online deliberation platforms to socially innovate and to re-engage citizens with the democratic process.

Anna De Liddo