A Survey of Web-Based Collective Decision Making Systems
A collective decision making system uses an aggregation mechanism to combine the input of individuals to generate a decision. The decisions generated serve a variety of purposes from governance rulings to forecasts for planning. The Internet hosts a suite
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International and Applied Technology Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 [email protected] Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
Abstract. A collective decision making system uses an aggregation mechanism to combine the input of individuals to generate a decision. The decisions generated serve a variety of purposes from governance rulings to forecasts for planning. The Internet hosts a suite of collective decision making systems, some that were inconceivable before the web. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of collective decision making systems into which we place seven principal web-based tools. This taxonomy serves to elucidate the state of the art in web-based collective decision making as well as to highlight opportunities for innovation.
11.1 Introduction Collective decision making is the aggregation of individuals’ information to generate a global solution. There are a variety of reasons that collective decisions are sought. A collective decision may be desirable to represent the opinions of a group, as in a vote. A collective decision may be desirable to collect the best information available, as in expert elicitation. Or a collective decision may be desirable to produce a new combination of ideas held within the group, as in a brainstorm session. The resulting decision may be employed directly or used as decision support for another process. For the purposes of this paper, mechanisms that elicit decisions from a group of people are called collective decision making systems (CDMSs). This designation is used to represent a departure from group decision support systems (a subfield of computer supported collaborative work) as CDMSs are not necessarily collaborative in nature [1]. In addition, this paper refers exclusively to web-based collective decision making systems, often called social software [2]. The unifying purpose of these systems is to structure individual input in such a way as to generate a meaningful aggregate decision, even if that input is implicitly derived or from asynchronous or anonymous contributions. The human proclivity to decide in a group is long standing. However, webbased tools for collective decision making have advanced this ability and need to a larger scale. In this article, seven types of popular web-based systems are R. Nayak et al. (Eds.): Evolution of the Web in Artificial Intel. Environ., SCI 130, pp. 243–277, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008 springerlink.com
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J.H. Watkins and M.A. Rodriguez
discussed—document ranking, folksonomy, recommender system, vote system, wiki, open source software, and prediction market—within a taxonomy of features. The decision capabilities that determine each type of CDMS are the result of a specific combination of features. These features can be organized into a taxonomy of problem space, implementation, individual features, and collective features. Such a taxonomy serves to distinguish the context under which a particular CDMS can b
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