Deliberation Technology

Spatial Annotation Technology for Public Deliberation

Many public policies and decisions deal with geospatially expressed problems that are complex and controversial in nature. Broad participation of all interested parties in the form of deliberative dialogues is crucial to making trustworthy decisions. However, supporting deliberative dialogues on spatial problems places unique requirements for technology mediation that go beyond the current stat...

Information Technology in Support of Public Deliberation

Increased citizen-to-citizen discussion and deliberation is an important potential of digital government initiatives. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal study of such outcomes using household survey data, focus groups and one-on-one interviews from a mature community network the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) in Blacksburg, Virginia, and surrounding Montgomery County. It addr...

Sequential Deliberation

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to continue deliberation, generating costly information, or stop and take a binding vote yielding a decision. For homogeneous committees, the model is a reinterpretation of the classic Wald (1947) sequential testing of statistical hypotheses. In heterogeneous committ...

“Talking It Out”: Deliberation With Others versus Deliberation Within

Modeling Deliberation in Teamwork

Cooperation in multi-agent systems essentially hinges on appropriate communication. This paper shows how to model communication in teamwork within TEAMLOG, the first multi-modal framework wholly capturing a methodology for working together. Taking off from the dialogue theory ofWalton and Krabbe, the paper focuses on deliberation, the main type of dialogue during team planning. We provide a fou...