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Relevant work and links for Decision Commons

Relevant work and links for Decision Commons

A broad range of related work may be relevant to the DecisionCommons. Articles and books here are annotated with a predicted relevance score in brackets, on a scale of 1 (very relevant) to 5 (probably not that relevant). If present, numbers in parentheses indicate number of citations in Google Scholar.

Methodologies and current practice for urban planning, public planning & public administration

Understanding the domain of urban planning is important for designing, well, a collaborative tools for public participation in urban planning. This section has pointers to work that might help build up that knowledge.

Wicked problems & Issue-based Information System (IBIS) methodology

The reference below sets forth the important notion of a wicked problem. Wicked problems are those problems where you essentially can never come to know a "correct" solution, and one in which it is highly doubtful that a consensus amongst stakeholders can ever be achieved. The conceptualization of a "wicked problem" has been very influential in thinking about the design of information systems in domains like policy generation. Some of that work is listed in other sections of this document.

After describing urban planning as a wicked problem, Rittel pioneered a method he called Issue-based information systems (IBIS), which called for designing technologies around issues, positions on those issues, and arguments for or against those positions. A manual for IBIS can be found here.

[2] (1051) Rittel, Horst, and Melvin Webber. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, 1973. (pdf).

Public participation in Urban Planning

[3] (71) Nancy Roberts. 1997. Public Deliberation: An Alternative Approach to Crafting Policy and Setting Direction. Public Administration Review, Vol. 57, No. 2 (summary)
[2] (16) Edward P. Weber and Anne M. Khademian. 1997. From Agitation to Collaboration: Clearing the Air through Negotiation. Public Administration Review, Vol. 57, No. 5 (summary)
[2] (135) Cheryl S. King, Kathryn M. Feltey, Bridget O'Neill. 1998. The Questions of Participation: Toward Authentic Public Participation in Public Administration. Public Administration Review 48. (summary)
[2] (9) Ryan, C. 1998. Leadership in collaborative policy-making: An analysis of agency roles in regulatory negotiations. Vol. 34, No. 3. Referenced by Innes & Booher 2004 as "the EPA discovered such collaborative dialogues could often work out a rule satisfactory to all" (summary?)
[2] (66) Edward C. Weeks. 2000. The Practice of Deliberative Democracy: Results from Four Large-Scale Trials. Public Administration Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (summary?)
[1] (29) Innes, J. and Booher, D. Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century. Planning theory & practice. V. 5 (4). 2004. (pdf). (summary).
[2] (79) Renée A. Irvin, John Stansbury (2004) Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It Worth the Effort?. Public Administration Review 64 (1) , 55–65 (summary?)
[2] (32) Innes, J. 2004. Consensus Building: Clarifications for the Critics. Planning Theory (3). (summary?)
[2] (12) Innes, J. and Gruber, J. 2005. Planning styles in conflict: the metropolitan transportation commission. Journal of the american planning association Vol. 71, No. 2. (summary?)

Conflict mediation & consensus

[2] Best practices for government agencies: Guidelines for using collaborative agreement-seeking processes. 1997. SPIDR Environment/Public Disputes Sector Critical Issues Committee. website

Briggs' strategy tools

Briggs is a sociologist at MIT and has a few nice guides that kind of cut across these categories.

[5] Briggs, X. 2003. Perfect fit or shotgun marriage?: understanding the power and pitfalls in partnerships. (summary)
[2] Briggs, X. 2003. We are all negotiators now: an introduction to negotiation in community problem-solving. see this website.
[2] Briggs, X. 2003. Planning Together: How (and how not) to engage stakeholders in charting a course. Cited by Innes & Booher as providing situations where collaborative participation has helped build social and political capital see this website.

Empirical studies of group decision making and negotiation with scientific models

Urban planning is not the only domain where scientific models have been employed in contentious planning domains. There is actually some amount of work that has examined, for example, how deliberations have been informed by water models.

[3] (11) Kenneth L. Kraemer and John Leslie King. Computer-Based Models for Policy Making: Uses and Impacts in the U.S. Federal Government. Operations Research, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1986)
[2] (19) Reitsma, R., Zigurs, I., Lewis, C., Wilson, V., Sloane, A. 1996. Experiment with Simulation Models in Water-Resources Negotiations. Journal of Water Resources Planning & Management. Lab study to find out how groups use simulation data in their deliberations.
[2] (6) Zigurs I., Reitsma R., Lewis C., Hübscher R., Hayes C. Accessibility of Computer-based Simulation Models in Inherently Conflict-Laden Negotiations. Group Decision and Negotiation, Volume 8, Number 6, November 1999 , pp. 511-533(23)
[2] (46) Piotr Jankowski, Timothy Nyerges (2001) GIS-Supported Collaborative Decision Making: Results of an Experiment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (1)
[1] (2) Jackson, S. 2006. Water models and water politics: design, deliberation, and virtual accountability. dg.o '06 Examines a case study of how decision making was facilitated in a contentious planning context. Very good read.

Political science & critical theory

Political science and political philosophers have a lot to say about democracy, public participation, citizenship, and engagement.

Civic engagement & deliberative democracy

[2] Coleman, S. and Blumler, J. (forthcoming, 2008) The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Very helpful overview of democratic theory, careful descriptions of attempts to support e-governance, and some important conclusions, particularly that people expect their participation to have an impact in some fashion. This has important design considerations. Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 7 are particularly insightful. (summary)
[3] Lance Bennett, Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age. Conceptions of what it means to be politically active may be changing; are youth really "disengaged"? (brief summary)
[3] Diane Mutz. 2004. Hearing the other side: Deliberative vs. Participatory Democracy summary
[2] John Hibbing, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. 2002. Stealth Democracy. Cambridge Press. Questions the usefulness of deliberative "situations in which people must reach a conclusion of some kind as a result of their interactions" (Mutz, 90-1). (summary)
[3] Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. 2003. Power and reason. In Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance, eds. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (summary?)
[3] Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright. 2003. Thinking about empowered participatory governance. In Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance, eds. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (summary)
[3] John Gastil. 2008. Political Communication and Deliberation. Sage.
[4] (35) Blaug, R. 2002. Engineering democracy. Political Studies vol. 50, no. 1. Referenced by Coleman & Blumler as identifying incumbent & critical democracy. C&B (pg. 4) argue that these are not mutually exclusive.
[2] (158) Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? Social Research vol. 66, no. 3. Critique of deliberative democracy based on deliberative democracy striving for universal rational consensus and essentially stripping the "political" out of political action.

Political philosophy

Mostly Habermas here, but we might also investigate Arendt (as in here)

[3] Habermas, Jurgen. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. In New German Critique. 1974. Quick and dirty definition & historical development of the public sphere.
[3] Arendt, Hannah. Human Condition on Action. I've been pointed to chapter 1, 2, and 5 as being particularly relevant.
[2] Isaac, J. Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Mar., 1994). Tries to reconcile Arendt's writings with deliberative democracy.

Law

[2] Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. (Summary)

Psychology

[4] (17) Green, Melanie C., Visser, Penny S., Tetlock, Philip E.. 2000. Coping with Accountability Cross-Pressures: Low-Effort Evasive Tactics and High-Effort Quests for Complex Compromises. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin Vol. 26. According to Mutz (63) , this article describes how "people became more aware of and able to balance valid arguments on both sides of an issue when they were exposed to strong arguments on both sides of an issue and anticipated having to justify their views to opinionated representatives of the conflicting sides...

Economics

[5] Olson, M. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge University Press. Cited by Innes & Booher as "broad but shallow interests represented by citizens will always be trumped by the narrow, deep interests represented by organized groups"

Computer support for deliberation

A large number of information systems have been designed to help support negotiations and deliberation in contentious situations. Two main, and somewhat entangled, lines of research have been most active: computer supported cooperative work and the business and management sciences.

Deliberation & argument visualization in computer-supported cooperative work

Work on supporting deliberation, after a period of popularity in mainstream CSCW in the eighties (particularly the gIBIS system listed below), has largely died off. Its too hard. Wicked problems are like that. A few people still work in the field, referred now to as computer-supported argument visualization (see Carr's book below), but direct support of deliberation has pretty much dropped off the CSCW map. The ECSCW urbansim paper below makes the specific distinction that indicators are meant as a tool to inform deliberation, not structure it. Aside from the UrbanSim ECSCW '05 paper, I haven't seen much work that couches design for public participation as a CSCW problem. I think there's a great opportunity to do so with this project.

[1] (16) Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Janet Davis, and Peyina Lin, Informing Public Deliberation: Value Sensitive Design of Indicators for a Large-Scale Urban Simulation. Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Paris, September 2005. (pdf) Development of indicator browser, employing a mapping of Habermas' conception of legitimation potential.
[4] (18) Cohen, A. L., Cash, D., and Muller, M. J. 2000. Designing to support adversarial collaboration. CSCW '00. What happens when you want parties to cooperate, yet they are blatantly in opposition to one another? Field study of a legal firm with an eye toward design.
[3] (16) Isenmann, S. and Reuter, W. D. 1997. IBIS—a convincing concept…but a lousy instrument?. DIS '97.
[3] (1029) Conklin, J. and Begeman, M. L. 1988. gIBIS: a hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion. CSCW '88. Seminal hypertext implementation of IBIS. Very thought provoking. (summary)
[3] Carr, C. Visualizing Argumentation : Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making. An edited volume on computer-supported argumentation visualization. All the major names in the field have a chapter.
[2] (3) Renton, A. and Macintosh, A. Computer-supported Argument Maps as a Policy Memory. The Information Society, v23. 2007. "Investigates to what extent computer-supported argument visualization can be designed to encourage debate and deliberation by citizens on public issues." (summary)
[2] (0) Malone, T. Klein, M. Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change. Innovations, Summer 2007, Vol. 2, No. 3. download here.
[2] (0) Klein, Mark. 2007. "The MIT Collaboratorium: Enabling Effective Large-Scale Deliberation for Complex Problems". MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4679-08. downloadable from.
[2] (6) Karacapilidis, N. Loukis, E. Dimopoulos, S. 2004. A Web-Based System for Supporting Structured Collaboration in the Public Sector. Springer Lecture Notes In Computer Science.

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) research in the management literature

The longest tradition of supporting group deliberations is in the management literature, captured in a class of systems termed Group Decision Support Systems, or GDSS. This line of research still goes on today, although it seems as if the operations research crowd has co-opted the field. The emphasis tends to be on supporting decision making in corporate settings where complex, time-dependent decisions must be made with imperfect and imperfectly shared information.

[3] (204) Watson, R., DeSanctis?, G., Poole, M. Using a GDSS to Facilitate Group Consensus: Some Intended and Unintended Consequences. MIS Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 1988). Study of GDSS effect on small-group consensus seeking.
[3] (23) Poole, M. S., Homes, M., and DeSanctis?, G. 1988. Conflict management and group decision support systems. CSCW '88. How conflict manifests and plays out in GDSS's.
[3] (259) Kraemer, K. L. and King, J. L. 1988. Computer-based systems for cooperative work and group decision making. ACM Comput. Surv. 20, 2 (Jul. 1988). Survey of GDSS field.
[2] (105) J. F. Nunamaker, Lynda M. Applegate and Benn R. Konsynski. Computer-Aided Deliberation: Model Management and Group Decision Support. Operations Research, Vol. 36, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1988). Looks to be mostly relevant to physical decision commons.
[3] (7) Samarasan, D. 1988. Collaborative modeling and negotiation. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEECS TC-OA 1988 Conference on office information Systems
[3] (5) Limayem, M., Banerjee, P., and Ma, L. 2006. Impact of GDSS: opening the black box. Decis. Support Syst. 42, 2 (Nov. 2006) Examines why there hasn't been a convergence of findings in the GDSS literature over the past couple decades.
[2] (48) Sack, W. Conversation Map: An Interface for Very-Large-Scale Conversations. Journal of management information systems. 2000. The author has been active in the design of online participatory e-gov systems, so this might warrant a read.

Modeling participation

How do people transform their behavior after being involved in a deliberative setting? I blogged about the importance of this dimension here

[3] Gastil, J., Deess, E. P., Weiser, P., & Meade, J. Jury service and electoral participation: A test of the participation hypothesis. Journal of Politics, 70, 1-16. Participation in jury duty affects voting activity. More here.
[4] Bryant, S. L., Forte, A., and Bruckman, A. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. GROUP '05. (pdf). Bryant et al. demonstrate how people's perception of Wikipedia shift from a resource perspective ("that's a useful resource") to seeing a vibrant community actively collaborating; transformations in tool use accompany this shift.

Public participation in new media

[1] Batya Friedman, Alan Borning, Janet Davis, Brian Gill, Peter Kahn, Travis Kriplean, and Peyina Lin. Laying the Foundations for Public Participation and Value Advocacy: Interaction Design for a Large Scale Urban Simulation, dg.o 2008. (pdf) Design of the indicator perspectives.
[4] Kriplean, T., Beschastnikh, I., McDonald?, D.W., Golder, S. Community, Consensus, Cooperation, Control: CS*W or how policy mediates mass participation. GROUP '07. (pdf). Power plays that are enacted by Wikipedians as they struggle to control content.
[3] Kelly, J., Fisher, D., and Smith, M. Debate, division, and diversity: political discourse networks in USENET Newsgroups. 2005.(pdf). Examines the diversity of viewpoints expressed in Usenet, in effect, one study of the echo chamber effect. In general, papers found here might be of interest.
[3] Girad, Stark. Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-Making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan. 2005. (pdf). Examines how the deliberative environment of New York was reorganized after 9/11.

Designing for consensus; rhetoric, speech acts, and discursive support

When designing for deliberation, its important to take into account the forms of communication that a system privileges.

Stasis theory

[4] Hohmann. The Dynamics of stasis: classical rhetorical theory and modern legal argumentation. 1989. Explore stasis in the context of legal debates.
[4] Hatch. Classical Stasis Theory and the analysis of public policy. Explores statis in the context of public policy
[4] Carter. Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric. 1988. includes a good section on stasis.

Speech acts & discourse, etc.

[4] Habermas, Jurgen. Communication and the evolution of society. Typology of communicative acts.
[5] Winograd, T., Flores, F. Understanding computers and cognition. 1986. Design for speech acts.
[4] Mancini, C. and Buckingham Shum, S. J. 2006. Modeling discourse in contested domains: A semiotic and cognitive framework. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 64, 11 (Nov. 2006)