The MIT deliberatorium: Enabling large-scale deliberation about complex systemic problems

Abstract

Humanity now finds itself faced with a range of highly complex problems - such as climate change, the spread of disease, international security, scientific collaborations, product development, and so on - that call upon us to bring together large numbers of experts and stakeholders to deliberate collectively on a global scale. Collocated meetings can however be impractically expensive, severely limit the concurrency and thus breadth of interaction, and are prone to serious dysfunctions such as polarization and hidden profiles. Social media such as email, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and web forums provide unprecedented opportunities for interacting on a massive scale, but have yet to realize their potential for helping people deliberate effectively, typically generating poorly-organized, unsystematic and highly redundant contributions of widely varying quality. Large-scale argumentation systems represent a promising approach for addressing these challenges, by virtue of providing a simple systematic structure that radically reduces redundancy and encourages clarity. This paper will address this important question, discussing (1) the strengths and limitations of current deliberation technologies, and (2) how large-scale argumentation can help address these limitations.