Mark Klein
Supporting Large-Scale Collaborative Deliberation: The MIT Deliberatorium

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Current open-source/peer-production technologies, such as forums, wikis and blogs, have enabled an unprecedented explosion of global knowledge sharing, but appear to be much less successful at enabling large-scale collaborative deliberation (i.e. the systematic enumeration, analysis, and selection of solution alternatives) around the complex systemic challenges, such as climate change, now facing humankind. In this talk, I will present a new kind of collaboration platform, based on the large-scale application of argumentation the-ory, aimed at addressing this weakness. I will present its rationale and design, as well as preliminary results obtained from field tests, involving deliberations on bio-fuel use in Italy and Switzerland, with over 600 participants.

Dr. Mark Klein (http://cci.mit.edu/klein/) is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and an Affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) as well as the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI). His re-search focuses on understanding the crosscutting fundamentals of coordination and apply-ing these insights to help create better human organizations and software systems. He has made contributions in the areas of computer-supported conflict management for collaborative design, design rationale capture, business process re-design, exception handling in workflow and multi-agent systems, service discovery, negotiation algorithms, understanding and resolving 'emergent' dysfunctions in distributed systems and, more recently, 'collective intelligence' systems to help people collaboratively solve complex problems like global warming.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Paul Hunter