VOSS: Empirical Analysis of Large-Scale Argumentation

提案：0943139题目：VOSS：大规模论证的实证分析pi: Mark KleinInstitution：麻省理工学院本奖项根据2009年美国复苏与再投资法案（公法111-5）资助。本研究将论证理论应用于大规模（数百到数千个用户）、异步和地理上分散的虚拟组织。解决高度复杂的科学和工程问题往往需要参与者之间有效的集体审议，这些参与者可能在地理上和时间上都是分散的。利用网络基础设施，虚拟组织将致力于同一问题的人们联系起来，并使他们能够共享信息。然而，当大量的人参与其中时，对互联网媒介讨论的贡献通常是分散和不系统的，质量参差不齐，并且是高度冗余的。目前基于网络的系统不能充分支持就真正复杂的问题进行集体审议，也不能就得到充分支持的决定和将要采取的行动达成一致。论证理论在小规模、面对面的环境中解决了这些限制，并将在这里扩展，通过在现实世界（商业、科学、政府和教育）的虚拟组织中进行一系列“行动研究”干预，为大规模、分布式的环境提供支持。使虚拟组织能够有效地讨论复杂的有争议的话题的技术可以在从教育到政府决策到商业决策到科学合作等领域产生巨大的积极影响。一个问题的专家和利益相关者社区可以更快、更便宜地得到利用，从而产生更广泛的潜在有用的想法。还可以从更广泛和更具代表性的角度对这些想法进行评估，从而提高关于气候变化、流行病和国际安全等影响大、多学科问题的集体决策的质量和及时性。

Proposal: 0943139Title: VOSS: Empirical Analysis of Large-Scale ArgumentationPI: Mark KleinInstitution: MITThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This research applies argumentation theory to large-scale (hundreds to thousands of users), asynchronous, and geographically dispersed virtual organizations. Solving highly complex scientific and engineering problems often requires effective collective deliberation among participants who may be geographically and temporally distributed. Using cyberinfrastructure, virtual organizations connect people working on the same problem and enable them to share information. However, when a large number of people are involved, contributions to internet-mediated discussions are typically scattered and unsystematic, vary widely in quality, and are highly redundant. Current web-based systems do not provide adequate support for collective deliberations on truly complex issues and convergence on well supported decisions and actions to be taken. Argumentation theory has addressed these limitations in small-scale, face-to-face settings and will be extended here to provide support for large-scale, distributed settings through a series of 'action research' interventions in real-world (business, scientific, government, and educational) virtual organizations.Techniques that enable virtual organizations to deliberate effectively about complex controversial topics can have an enormous positive impact in domains that range from education to government policy-making to business decision-making to scientific collaborations. The community of experts and stakeholders for a problem can be tapped more quickly and inexpensively to generate a much broader range of potentially useful ideas. Evaluations of these ideas can also be provided from a much broader and more representative range of perspectives improving the quality and timeliness of collective decisions about high-impact, multi-disciplinary problems such as climate change, epidemics, and international security.