A debate dashboard to enhance online knowledge sharing
| Date | 10 February 2012 |
| Pages | 67-93 |
| Published date | 10 February 2012 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055721211207770 |
| Author | Luca Iandoli,Ivana Quinto,Anna De Liddo,Simon Buckingham Shum |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
A debate dashboard to enhance
online knowledge sharing
Luca Iandoli and Ivana Quinto
Department of Business and Management Engineering,
University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy, and
Anna De Liddo and Simon Buckingham Shum
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Abstract
Purpose – In this paper the aim is to present Debate Dashboard, an online collaborative platform
designed to support distributed knowledge management and decision making. The platform
integrates an argument mapping tool with visual widgets with the objective of enhancing collective
sense-making and mutual understanding as well as to compensate for the costs of mediated
communication in virtual collaborative environments.
Design/methodology/approach – The design of Debate Dashboard is based on the theory of
common ground according to which participants involved in a conversation build mutual
understanding thanks to the exchange of different types of feedback. Using the concept of grounding
cost, the authors identified several features of the Dashboard supposed to favour mutual
understanding and knowledge sharing. Such features have been implemented through six visual
widgets selected through a benchmarking of currently available visualization tools.
Findings – The paper discusses the limitations and advantages of online argumentation to support
online discussions and presents a review of current visualization tools. The design of a new platform
able to integrate online argumentation and visualization technologies is described and it is argued that
Debate Dashboard will improve online collaboration in many respects especially in terms of
supporting the construction of shared knowledge representations for geographically distributed
collaborative teams.
Originality/value – First, the work adds to the debate on the development of online argumentation
platforms by offering an alternative theoretical perspective based on language and conversational
studies. Second, it proposes for the first time to integrate argumentation and visualization technologies
in the same tool to create an augmented collaborative platform able to overcome the limitations of both
traditional online collaboration technologies, such as forums and wikis, as well as the criticalities
associated with the use of argumentation technologies.
Keywords Debate dashboard,Online knowledge sharing, Visualizationtools, Grounding costs,
Argumentationmapping tools, Knowledge management, Decision making
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
As global competition is increasing, collaboration is becoming a key factor for the
success of organizations (Inkpen, 1996). A second generation of web technologies ha s
provided enterprises with new models and tools for sustaining and improving
collaboration and co-creation of new knowledge. These digital platforms are
collectively labelled “Web 2.0” technologies (O’Reilly and Musser, 2006). Web 2.0 has
allowed individuals and organizations to share and exchange information intelligence
and build social capital on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago.
In particular, the diffusion of Web 2.0 collaborative technologies in the workplace
has enabled members of geographically dispersed team to collaborate, capture,
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A debate
dashboard
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VINE: The journal of information and
knowledge management systems
Vol. 42 No. 1, 2012
pp. 67-93
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0305-5728
DOI 10.1108/03055721211207770
exchange and share knowledge in easier, cheaper and more pervasive ways than
traditional KM systems (Hayden, 2004).
These new collaborative platforms have radically modified the way in which
knowledge is created, managed and shared, improving productivity and accelerating
innovation processes for the firms. Web 2.0 collaboration platforms allow enterprises
to develop “out of box” capabilities for collectively generating, sharing and refining
information and business knowledge in a bottom-up, self-organizing fashion.
One of the most acclaimed features of Web 2.0 is actually its participatory aspect.
Literature suggests that Web 2.0 technologies encourage a more human-oriented
approach to interactivity on the web, supporting a better group interaction and
fostering a greater sense of community in a potentially “cold” social environment
(Wallace, 1999). People are able to network, collaborate and interact freely through
tools like social networks, micro Blogs, Wikis, Forums etc. Through such tools,
workers, partners, suppliers, customers and other possible stakeholders can interact
and co-produce new knowledge. Not only they self-identify the contents that are most
relevant for their activity but they are also able to set up the knowledge structures and
the collaborative processes that are adequate to their collaborative needs. In this way,
virtual collaborators co-design collaborative platforms that reflect the way work really
gets done (McAfee, 2006).
However, current Web 2.0 technologies such as online forums, social networks or
trust and reputation systems have also been criticized in many respects. One of the
main criticisms regards their inability to organize and evaluate knowledge in a reliable
way. Information collected through online collaboration has often been considered
overwhelming, redundant and of disputable quality, especially when produced in the
course of controversial debate. In part as a reaction to such criticisms, designers of
collaborative tools have provided additional effort to develop alternative platforms
able to better organize knowledge provided by many, dispersed and often anonymous
contributors for later reuse or assessment. Among the proposed alternatives, online
collaborative mapping tools have received considerable attention (Stefik, 1986; Malone
et al., 1987; Novak, 1998). The basic assumption behind this approach is that
displaying knowledge visually through a spatial metaphor, such as a map, is helpful
for key cognitive tasks such as sense-making of large amount of (conflicting)
information (Uren et al., 2006) or localization of relevant contributions.
In this paper we focus on a particular kind of web-based collaborative mapping
platform known as Argument Mapping Tools (henceforth AMTs). AMTs provide a
web-based user interface that allows users to co-create, navigate and edit argument
maps. An argument map is a representation of reasoning in which the evidential
relationships among claims are made wholly explicit using graphical or other
non-verbal techniques (van Gelder, 2003). They are supposed to be particularly suited
to represent controversial debates because they allow users to represent controversial
point of view in a coherent structures made up of alternative positions on an issue at
stake with their associated chains of pros and cons arguments.
While different studies have proved that AMTs may provide organizations with
several advantages (Skyrme, 1998; Novak, 1998; Conklin, 2003), they have not received
widespread diffusion. Possi ble explanations of the limited su ccess of online
argumentation as a collaborative technology involve factors such as the steep
learning that average users are required to climb to be proficient with knowledge
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