Bringing understanding in societal decision making: explaining and communicating analyses?

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, there have been growing demands for a more participative approach to societal decision making and a higher level of accountability on the part of politicians and decision makers. Concurrently, the development of the Internet has provided an infrastructure to achieve these ends through substantive e‐democracy. e‐Democracy systems have the potential to draw on developments in decision support systems (DSS), involving stakeholders and the public in societal decisions. We argue that the key need in developing DSS for e‐democracy contexts is to provide interfaces which explain the decision analytic techniques to users with a wide range of abilities, skills and cultures, using as an example an early application of automated explanations within a nuclear emergency management DSS. By building natural language context specific, sometimes graphical explanations, to explain and document the judgements needed in the process, this seeks to make the information from the application's domain knowledge broadly available and understandable. While recognizing that this application is limited, we believe that more sophisticated automated explanation facilities will be essential in e‐democracy systems and we discuss the issues to be faced in developing these. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.