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IFIP ePart 2010, Lausanne2. September 2010 – 17:00 by Centre for E-Government |
The sub-catagories of the ePart 2010 (dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy) were foundations, eParticipation initiatives, understanding & evaluation and ICT & eVoting. The conference was colocated with and held in parallel tracks to the EGOV 2010.
KEYNOTE
ANN MACINTOSH (UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS): ARGUMENT VISUALISATION ? THE KEY TO UNLOCKING ONLINE DELIBERATION??
„The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.“ (Oscar Wilde)
Macintosh presentation focused on argument visualisation with reference to it’s possible value for policy making. Before combining these two research topics, she summarised the history and current state of research in the field of online deliberation by browsing to the main arguments of the following book titles which argue the need for deliberation:
- Hay 2007: Why we hate politics
- Stoker 2006: Why politics matter: Making demoracy work
- Fishkin 1991: Democracy and deliberation
- Dryzek 200: Deliberative democracy and beyon
Others then claimed a potential of the internet for enhancing deliberation, like Dahlgren 2005: The internet public sphere. Whilst this is not a new research area (see Dutton 1992: Political Science research on teledemocracy), with the more sophisticated technology of today we are moving from the traditional text-based to a new form of deliberation. And with people using the web 2.0 a much bigger audience is attracted. Macintosh argued that the linear form of information in debate fails to capture real life argument patterns and does not enable people to think of arguments. The capacity of technology has not been like we expected it in the 90ies. It’s potential to enhance democracy has not been realised yet. Why is that? The overall reason might be to many expectations: One one hand, we are expecting too much from governments and politicians (they need to give up power), on the other hand too much of the citizens (e.g. with reference to the digital divide). Not least we’re also expecting too much of technology.
Online deliberation presents large problem spaces. Coming up with an own opinion and to formulate an informal contribution is difficult, especially when taking into account the complexity of policy development. From the socio-technical perspective, the problems are the following:
- making sense of unstructured text
- knowing what critical questions to ask
- ensuring inclusive deliberation.
This is where argument mapping comes into play – seen as a tool to make sense of unstructured text and visualising language. Argument visualisation provides an alternative way of representing text in online deliberation forms. TheODET 2010 workshop was dealing with online deliberation tools emerging from the labs. If you are interested in argument mapping it is worth browsing the posts tagged „argument mapping“ on http://digitalcitizenship.co.uk where you’ll find a video covering some of the tools presented at the conference.
