Group decision-making

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Group decision making is an essential of the alignment process in trust groups, and is defined as one of the essential aspects of a platform. The platform specification requires that members of the group have available a simple interface allowing questions or choices to be collaborated upon by the members.

Group decision-making involves the members determining a course of action together from out of the available options. These options can be thought of as directions and each has an associated cost in terms of time and resources which, if known, allows the group to make an informed decision.

For most decisions, simple tools like Idea Storm are a very useful and productive component for groups and projects to have available, but for larger-scale decisions that affect many stakeholders or even people's rights a more complete system of governance is required.

Plugin approach to decision-making

One idea I've been thinking about is to make a plugin-based system similar to Disqus which adds a section at the bottom of the page allowing for users to add comments.

Comments could then fall into a number of levels of decision making mechanism:

  • Free discussion with ratings (star-ratings would be better than simple up/down votes)
  • Free discussion with ratings biased by a karma system (can be omni-dimensional or multi-dimensional using the page's tags)
  • Formal discussion where each top-level comment is a formal position, and the "replies" are arguments for and against each position and then a format means of supplying evidence linked to a source and a rated authority. Normal discussion can then occur within each argument and evidence item. The rating is star and karma based, but the IPAESA gives it a more organised structure.

The plugin could provide the page tagging mechanism as well, which would allow external positions and arguments to be assessed as well.

See also