Deliberation4Good

Human societies have evolved a variety of successful structures for communication and negotiation between individuals with diverse or conflicting viewpoints. These range from manners governing polite conversation, to laws around jury trials, procedures for formal debates, academic peer review, and even the processes of democratic elections. The development of new digital technologies in the space of social media, natural language processing and machine learning is accelerating the disruption of these old forms of communication. At the same time, it also creates platforms for new possibilities.

Research into decision-making has shown that groups collaborating on a problem can, in the right conditions, outperform even the most knowledgeable of individual group members. The exchange of arguments has been shown to be key to this. Technologies which support better argument production, exchange and comprehension have great potential both in understanding how we can make better decisions, and in enhancing personal, educational and workplace environments where argument exchange can boost productivity and wellbeing.

The first edition of the Deliberation4Good workshop will bring together experts in existing and emerging technologies of argumentative communication, to explore how the old can inform the new and how the new can augment the old. We are gathering people from psychology, social, political and computer science to provide a platform for them to collaborate and share their research, towards answering the moonshot question: “How can people with diverging views be supported to successfully communicate and negotiate?”