Negotiating Meaning in a Blog-Based Community

This chapter addresses how members of a blog-based community share problems and support each other in the problem solving process, both sharing knowledge and offering support. Problems are divided into three categories, unique, shared, and community, each having its own particular norms for presentation, knowledge sharing, and resolution. Additionally, processes may differ based on discourse that centers on one individual blog versus discourse that spans multiple blogs. Findings show that intersubjectivity, norms, roles, and individual ownership of virtual space all are important elements contributing to the problem sharing and solving process.

Chewing the Communal Cud

Contending that media users are more than consumers and that the mass media are able to achieve more in the public sphere than simply meet market demand, Mummery and Rodan argue in this chapter that some types of mass media may in fact fulfil public sphere responsibilities. The authors demonstrate how forums such as broadsheet letters to the editor and online political blogs—despite their commonly recognised limitations due to influence by private/commercial ownership, editorship, and the requirements of authorship—may exemplify, enable and support community deliberation over issues of public concern. More specifically, via engaging with Jürgen Habermas’ conceptions of the necessary conditions for rational and communal deliberation, and critically examining recent debates in these forums, the authors argue both that these mediated forums can enable and exemplify community deliberation and, more generally, that community deliberation itself does not need to be strictly consensus-oriented to be productive.

Group Decision Making for Advanced Manufacturing Technology Selection Using the Choquet Integral

Advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) is defined as a modern method of production incorporating highly automated and sophisticated computerized design and operational systems. Hence, an investment decision to adopt AMT is a strategic decision. A group decision making process is stressful when group members have different views under multiple and conflicting criteria. Satisfying group members’ opinions has a critical impact on a decision. In this chapter, a multiple criteria group decision making problem under a fuzzy environment is used for the selection among AMTs. Choquet integral methodology is used for this selection. A strategic investment problem of a company for a suitable Automated Storage/Retrieval System (AS/RS) is considered and discussed.

Methods of Group Decisions and Aggregation of Experts’ Opinions

Expert evaluation is often the most reliable way to predict results of a certain process. Estimates from several experts are usually needed in order to achieve correct decision making. This chapter presents and systematically sorts methods for aggregation expert opinions with respect to specific features of the decision making process. Based on information theory, the chapter introduces concepts for understanding expert consensusand also discusses the impact of suppressing/emphasizing extreme estimates or of unequally valuing individual estimates. This chapter addresses the estimation of YES/NO binary results as well as numeric values of a certain attribute and also considers cases when only an estimate or a dispersion of opinions of experts is considered.

Collaborative Transportation Sharing

This chapter explores the role that information sharing has on the collective decisions made in supply chain management. The authors identify information sharing as the critical factor in reasoning that occurs as stakeholders along the supply chain collaboratively make decisions. However, a shared conceptual model is required for determining what information must be shared. Their model identifies five elementsin information system management related to shared logistics projects: the enterprise‘s solutions (for each stakeholder and for the entire reasoning community), their deals, sharing management, organizational features and information and communication technologies related to the management of shared information. Moreover, the main accelerating and limitating factors are overviewed.The chapter illustrates the applicability of the model with a case study on the distribution of newspapers in France.

Indexing as an Ontological Support for Legal Reasoning

Legal reasoning is still insufficiently understood. Formalisations of legal reasoning have failed so far, due in particular to the non-consideration of societal and legal complexity. Thus, the network of co-operative reasoning and its compilation and analysis should be represented by an index of legal and fact concepts of a legal ontology. The Dynamic Electronic Legal Commentary (DynELCom) constitutes such a semantic description and analysis of the legal information system. Knowledge acquisition tools support the establishment and refinement of the extensive ontology. Since a first ontology exists in European law, international law and Austrian law, this chapter also presents early experiments on EU state aid law which show the feasibility of the approach. Next steps will be a deep refinement of the ontology and the development of a dialogue system.

Distributed Collaborations and the Effect of Sociometric Feedback

Distributed collaborations tend to have different communication patterns and performances compared to co-located collaborations. This chapter proposes using sociometric feedback to understand and help distributed collaborations. The proposed system uses sociometric badges to automatically detect communication behaviors of groups and uses the information to provide real-time visual feedback. The goal of the feedback system is to encourage cooperation and furthermore improve the performance of both individuals and groups. This system could allow distributed collaborations to be more similar to co-located collaborations since it can sense and reintroduce the social signals lost in computer mediated communication. The chapter presents the results of two experimental laboratory studies that examine the effectiveness of the system. Results show that real-time sociometric feedback changes not only the communication patterns of distributed groups but also their performance, making it similar to that of co-located groups.

Supporting Communities of Practice by Advancing Knowledge Management

In this chapter the authors investigate a tool integration perspective to support knowledge management and exchange between Web-based and traditional collaborative environments. In particular they discuss the integration between a tool (CoPe_it!) supporting collaborative argumentation and learning in Web-based communities of practices and a hypermedia and sense making tool (Compendium) acting as a personal and collective knowledge management (KM) system in traditional collaborative environments. The authors describe the tools and drive a comparative analysis of the two groupware by focusing on the general applicability of the tools integration for supporting communities of practices and, more generally, collaborative works. Moreover the authors present the results of a case study in which the tools integration has been applied within a real community of practice. Finally they discuss main results of the tools integration in order to leverage communities of practice to a truly collaborative environment with no communication boundaries.

Spatial Ontologies in Multi-Agent Environmental Planning

Landscapes and townscapes have been studied by many disciplinary areas over time. This study addresses the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of environmental spacescapes in planning by human agents. In fact, because of their dynamic complexity, environmental spacescapes create challengesfor the typical spatial behaviour of an agent perceiving and navigating in it. Therefore, environmental planning activities need to identify and manage the ‘fundamentals’ of spacescapes from the viewpoints of living single agents or multi-agent organizations, those to whom the planning effort is addressed. In this framework, the chapter deals with spatial ontologies in multi-agent systems. Some recent experiments are described and discussed here, highlighting spatial features of navigated environments from an environmental planning perspective.

A Case for the Re-Use of Community Reasoning

In software engineering, the re-use concept is a design principle that improves efficiency, quality and maintainability by ensuring that software artifacts are developed once and re-used many times. In an analogous way, a group‘s reasoning can be imagined to be re-used by that or another group to enhance efficiency, transparency and consistency in decision-making. However, the re-use of reasoning is difficult to achieve because group reasoning cannot easily be captured and the way in which a group reasoning artifact is subsequently used is not obvious. This chapter explores the case for the re-use of community reasoning and concludes that individuals can benefit from a representation of a previous group‘s coalesced reasoning if the reasoning to be modeled and the scheme to represent the reasoning have been selected to suit the task. The authors contend that specifying the future community likely to re-use the reasoning, called the intended audience, informs a decision regarding whether an exercise aimed at coalescing a group‘s reasoning is best performed verbally, in writing or with the use of more structured schemes such as Argument visualization.