Enabling Deliberations in a Political Party Using Large-Scale Argumentation: A Preliminary Report

Humanity now finds itself faced with a range of highly complex and controversial challenges - such as climate change, the spread of disease, international security, scientific collaborations, product development, and so on- that call upon us to bring together large numbers of experts and stakeholders to deliberate collectively on a global scale. Collocated meetings can however be impractically expensive and are prone to serious dysfunctions, especially at large scales. Social media such as email, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and web forums provide unprecedented opportunities for interacting on a massive scale, but typically generate vast, poorly-organized, unsystematic and highly redundant corpuses of widely varying quality. Argumentation systems represent a promising approach for addressing these challenges, by virtue of providing a simple systematic structure that radically reduces redundancy and encourages clarity, but these have been used almost exclusively for small-scale deliberations. This paper represents a preliminary report on using an argumentation system to enable largescale deliberations, involving over 400 members of the Italian Democratic Party, on electoral law reform. It is, to our knowledge, one of very few evaluations of large-scale argumentation, as well as the first to include a systematic comparison with conventional (web forum based) online.