FLAIRS-29 Poster Abstracts

DirectDemocracyP2P (ddp2p.net) provides an environment for electronic debates, moderated in a decentralized way by ordering justifications (aka comments) based on collaborative filtering. The intuition was that comment threading models for such systems ought to have the peculiarity that each user should be allowed to submit a single justification when voting for a given motion, unlike common fora. To verify such intuitions, it is important to evaluate and compare the qualities of different available threading models with respect to specific applications. We propose to use a set of interviews to evaluate the "Understandability" of different threading models. We ask participants to navigate the same debates on three systems with similar graphical features and where the only difference consists of the alternative threading models being analyzed. Then participants list the arguments they remember. The debate systems with the desired threading models are obtained using the flexible user interface of DebateDecide (debatedecide.org) and the main challenge remained to port the same debates into the corresponding threading models. The solution undertaken in our study consists of selecting two debates from a well-organized televised session rich in arguments and interaction, but an unusual topic, such as to provide a level playground to the interviewed participants. The debates are further recast into the compared models by replaying them in the way expected from advanced users of the corresponding systems.