Political, Dialectical and Conative Aspects of a Collaborative Decision Making Tool for CoPs

Designed for and evaluated by computer science researchers, medical doctors and civil and mechanical engineers, the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) tool HERMES (Karacapilidis and Papadias, 1998, 2001) is about to be adapted for another kind of audience, i.e. the communities of practices (CoPs) under the name “COPE_IT!” (http://copeit.cti.gr/) and currently developed in the framework of the project PALETTE (Pedagogically sustained Adaptive Learning Through the exploitation of Tacit and Explicit knowledge). The aim of this paper is to suggest three directions of development that would provide new functionalities to this CDM tool having to take into account some essential characteristics of CoPs and that, like HERMES did, intend to “augment classical decision making approaches by supporting argumentative discourse among decision makers” (Karacapilidis and Papadias, 2001: 1-2).