Structuring Communication Processes and Enhancing Public Discourse: The Delphi Method Revisited

Increased advances in communication technology have enabled computermediated communication among geographically dispersed individuals, and created opportunities for them to participate in socio-political decisions at the local, national and global level. Consequently, the structuring of communication processes for facilitating discourse among larger groups of individuals becomes a challenge. Delphi is one of the most used methods for structuring group communication among experts. This paper theoretically evaluates the usability of Delphi for discourses among larger groups from the perspective of various public discourse criteria, which are endorsed by public discourse models in modern democracies. Our assessment of Delphi suggests that Delphi is in principle open for the realization of several discourse conventions in practice. The paper also discusses the value of the implementation of Delphi-like structures in a Social Decision Support System (SDSS) and provides some suggestions for future research. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proceedings of the 9th International Working Conference on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2004) Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, June 2-3, 2004 (M. Aakhus, M. Lind, eds.) www.scils.rutgers.edu/lap04/lap04.htm