Maßstäbe für gelungene Deliberation: (Walton and
Krabbe 1995). Effective deliberation requires that:
• All important issues are considered
• The broadest possible range of high-quality solution ideas are identified
• The strongest arguments for and against each idea are captured
• People can distinguish good from bad arguments
• Individual select solutions rationally, i.e. they consider all the important issues and ideas, and
make selections that are consistent with the arguments they most trust
• The aggregate results fairly represent the “wisdom of the people


By far the most commonly used technologies, including wikis like wikipedia, media sharing sites
like youtube facebook and flickr, open source efforts such as Linux Mozilla and Apache, idea
markets such as innocentive, and web forums such as digg and Slashdot, fall into the sharing
category. While such tools have been remarkably successful at enabling a global explosion of
idea and knowledge sharing, they face serious shortcomings from the standpoint of enabling
large-scale deliberation around complex and controversial topics (Sunstein 2006) (also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia):low signal-to-noise ratio. The content captured by sharing tools is notorious for being
voluminous and highly repetitive. This is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: since it can be
difficult to find out whether an idea has already been proposed in a large existing corpus, it’s
more likely that minor variants will be posted again and again by different people. People
may also, conversely, decide not to enter an idea, assuming it already appears somewhere.
This low signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to uncover the novel ideas that inspire people
to generate creative new ideas of their own.
• unsystematic coverage caused by bottom-up volunteer-based contributions. It’s hard to tell
what areas are covered in detail and which are not, since there is no compact overview
available and no one ‘in charge’. There is, as a result, no guarantee that the key issues, best
ideas, and strongest arguments have been systematically identified.
• balkanization: Users of sharing systems often tend to self-assemble into groups that share the
same opinions - there is remarkably little cross-referencing, for example, between liberal and
conservative web blogs and forums - so they tend to see only a subset of the issues, ideas,
and arguments potentially relevant to a problem.
• dysfunctional argumentation: Sharing systems do not inherently encourage or enforce any
standards concerning what constitutes valid argumentation, so postings are often bias- rather
than evidence- or logic-based, and spurious argumentation is common. Users with divergent
opinions often engage in forum “flame wars” (wherein discussions degrade into repetitive
arguments and ad hominem attacks) and wiki “edit wars” (where users attempt to “win” by
removing each other’s perspectives from an article). Such phenomena have forced the
shutdown of many forums as well as the locking of many wikipedia pages (so they can not be
edited by the public). All these effects seriously degrade the community’s ability to fully
consider a problem.
• hidden consensus: Sharing tools do not provide any explicit means for identifying a group’s
consensus on a given issue.

1. Mark Klein, “The MIT Collaboratorium: Enabling Effective Large-Scale Deliberation for Complex Problems,” SSRN eLibrary (Dezember 2007), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1085295.