There is an increasing awareness that participatory methods for decision-making (such as voting mechanisms) do not always reach the most desirable outcomes. Some of the most reported reasons are:
Most tools for (online) decision making do not address this discrepancy sufficiently. In fact, these tools focus mostly on the argumentation process preceding the decision, giving little support to the acceptance process following the decision. In particular, we consider argumentation-based tools which provide participants in a debate the possibility to propose alternatives, support alternatives, add comments or justifications for alternatives, vote on alternatives. See www.airesis.eu, http://deliberatorium.mit.edu/login?english or https://mood.tbm.tudelft.nl/ for some examples
In this hackathon we are going to explore methods and tools to support decision-making. The following are some of possible directions for the work:
The aim is to arrive at a working prototype that implements (some of) these aspects. Participants are encouraged to use their prefered open source tools and reuse any suitable infrastructure. Resulting code will be made available open source for further exploration and use, e.g through Github.
For questions or further information, contact Virginia Dignum, m.v.dignum@tudelft.nl