Conference Paper

Managing Large Scale On-line Discussions: Secrets of the Open Meeting

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Abstract

The possibility of communities steering themselves by large scale, online meetings are limited by support system capabilities for managing their discourse. An asynchronous conferencing system the Open Meeting supported a meeting in which thousands of U.S. government workers discussed reengineering government services. It enabled users to learn and share opinions about proposed changes, because its design focused on decomposing the inflows of comments, structuring multi-lateral conversations and maintaining civility. Access was provided over SMTP and HTTP to a topically differentiated hypertext synthesized from an object database, which was extended by users’ comments. The comments composed virtual conversations, structured by a discourse grammar that constrained what types of comments could be attached in specific contexts. Civility benefitted from use of moderators and from participants’ having similar bureaucratic culture backgrounds. The results suggest that cultural diversity is a greater challenge than numbers to enabling effective on-line democratic action.

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... Miyashita et al. discussed how to build agent communities toward business knowledge base generation [18]. For generating consensus over communities, the Open Meeting environment [10] is intended to support discussions by large numbers of people. One such meeting was actually held on the Internet for a United States national performance review. ...
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