Managing Large Scale On-line Discussions: Secrets of the Open Meeting

Abstract

The possibility of communities steering themselves by large scale, online meetings are limited by support system capabilities for managing their discourse. An asynchronous conferencing system the Open Meeting supported a meeting in which thousands of U.S. government workers discussed reengineering government services. It enabled users to learn and share opinions about proposed changes, because its design focused on decomposing the inflows of comments, structuring multi-lateral conversations and maintaining civility. Access was provided over SMTP and HTTP to a topically differentiated hypertext synthesized from an object database, which was extended by users’ comments. The comments composed virtual conversations, structured by a discourse grammar that constrained what types of comments could be attached in specific contexts. Civility benefitted from use of moderators and from participants’ having similar bureaucratic culture backgrounds. The results suggest that cultural diversity is a greater challenge than numbers to enabling effective on-line democratic action.

The on-line meeting described herein was a collaboration of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the National Performance Review, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Mitre Corporation. Jonathan Gill, Thomas Kalil, Randy Katz and Howard Shrobe provided more support. Research was partly supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under contract number MDA972-93-1-003N7.