The document discusses the role of hypermedia technologies in enhancing public participation in urban planning and decision-making through moderated and open deliberation models. It highlights the development of tools, such as Compendium and Olnet, to improve transparency and empower community voices by capturing deliberation digitally and facilitating collective intelligence. Challenges in balancing coherence with open participation are addressed, emphasizing the need for effective filtering and structuring of deliberation content.

1. ODET 2010: Online Deliberation Emerging Tools Workshop
Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation
(Leeds, 30 June–2 July, 2010)
Moderated VS Open Deliberation:
Hypermedia Technologies to
Enhance Public Participation
Anna De Liddo & Simon Buckingham Shum
Knowledge Media Institute
Open University, UK
a.deliddo@open.ac.uk ; S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk
olnet.org

2. Our Approach
We investigate different aspects and issues of Public Participation in Urban
Planning and Decision-Making focusing on the key role of
 deliberation practice,
 deliberation tracking and
 deliberation representation
to enable more effective public participation.
We look at Hypermedia discourse technologies to help move us from
a deliberation process which is often ephemeral, ill-structured and
disempowering, to deliberation which is persistent, more coherent and
participatory.

3. Two Research Strands
 Improving transparency:
Supporting deliberation capturing and representation
By recording deliberation and discourse digitally to make it possible to
interrogate later on and use deliberation contents to actively inform decision
making
 Empowering Community voices and ideas:
Facilitating Open Public Inquiry and Collective Intelligence
By developing a “virtual agora” for open public inquiry on common policy issues

4. Two hypermedia tools to support
Moderated Vs Open Deliberation
Compendium
olnet.org

5. Two deliberation Models: Moderated
Deliberation VS Open Deliberation
Compendium
Compendium supports a moderated Cohere supports an open deliberation
deliberation model in which a facilitator/ model in which issues are created and
mapper interprets deliberations (either live or discussed without pre-defined communication
post-hoc) in order to create hypermedia maps by language, without facilitation and in an open
naming, classifying, linking and summarizing deliberation environment.
deliberation contents. All participants have equal editing privileges, and
The mapper is entrusted to create coherent create together new ideas, raise issues, ask
argument maps out of several dialogues and questions, provide answers and propose
deliberation processes. arguments and counterarguments with an open
semantic framework (not necessarily IBIS).
olnet.org

6. Argument Maps vs
Dynamic Collective Claims maps
Compendium
Deliberation result is a discourse Deliberation result is a Collective
arguments map, which is crafted Claims map, which is a dynamic
by the information/knowledge map of claims cooperatively
manager; who facilitate by generated by many hands and
 Selecting/Filtering watched by many eyes, and
 Structuring continuously changing. This map
 Highlighting is structured by an ongoing un-
 Representating moderated debate and potentially
deliberation contents. can involve all citizens.
It is the dynamic result of an
“open virtual agora”.

7. Challenges:
Coherence vs Open Participation
Compendium
On one side moderated argument On one hand enabling the creation of
mapping improves coherence unframed dynamic maps of claims,
and unambiguity in the message cooperatively generated, opens up to
who is communicated. wider participation, since it lowers
usability and cognitive barriers
users have to overcome to contribute
to the conversation.
On the other side it introduces
an important level of discretion On the other hand it hampers
coherence and increases noise
since the mapper filters what is
and ambiguity of what are relevant
meant to be relevant to inform
messages to inform decision-making.
decision making.

8. For Moderated Deliberation
Compendium
olnet.org

9. Social View
Exploration Path

10. Dialogical/Argumentative View

11. Geographical View of Deliberation contents

12. Design Rational View backed on deliberation contents

13. Temporal View of Deliberation contents

14. Open Deliberation model
Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vthygbKA2Mg

15. Creating structure
Compendium
Crowdsourcing
participation