From ‘Collecting' to ‘Deciding'

Abstract

Current tools aiming at supporting argumentative collaboration either provide means to successfully tame wicked problems or offer advanced reasoning mechanisms to facilitate decision making creating a gap in today’s landscape of systems supporting argumentative collaboration. The consequences of this gap are in particular severe for communities of practice when they have to employ tools from both sides to support their collaboration needs. The authors argue that a key factor in bridging this gap is viewing argumentative collaboration as an emergent phenomenon. Proper support of the emergent aspects of argumentative collaboration would benefit systems supporting argumentative collaboration as this would enable those systems to support the evolution of the entire collaboration at different levels. The authors describe how such approach has been implemented in CoPe_it! a prototype argumentative collaboration support system. In CoPe_it!, an incremental formalization approach facilitates the emergence of individual and loosely coupled resources into coherent knowledge structures and finally decisions.