Last week while in the Bay State I got to meet Mark Klein of The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Among other things, Mark is working on "The Collaboratorium" to "help large groups efficiently arrive at well-founded conclusions." "Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change," an
article he co-authored with Thomas Malone, describes an inspiring vision for how online deliberation and modeling tools could help address global climate change. Andrew Revken at the New York Times recently discussed the project in his blog.

Mark has a working demonstration of the argument management portion of the Collaboratorium which is a software implementation of argumentation theory. His software also includes the first set of hooks to the modeling portion of the system so that users can test their assumptions.

Mark was generous enough to answer a couple of questions on video. Here he

• describes what a large scale deliberation system is and
• explains how arguments are structured in the system.

A more complete description of the system (10 min), by Mark, is on YouTube.

deliberation | Policycommons
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