e-Democracy: A Group Decision and Negotiation Perspective
About this ebook
Drawing on the experience accumulated from our previous research, we believe that the GDN community may have a lot to contribute and improve the current status, through the use of web-based decision and negotiation analysis tools to structure and articulate participative deliberations. We shall describe a general framework and architecture for e-participation and analyse in detail the required modules to implement such architecture, together with viewpoints referring to how may we support unsophisticated users to conduct, or at least explore, decision analysis; to discover and build consensus; on how to facilitate large, diverse, dispersed, multi-cultural groups, many of whom may share few common values, possibly interested in different decision methodologies. We also illustrate with several relevant case studies how such framework may be implemented. It behoves the GDN community to lead the debate and conduct the research to address these questions, so that society uses e-participation wisely, possibly through the type of architectures we propose.
About the author
David Rios Insua is Professor of Statistics and Operation Research and Vicerector at Rey Juan Carlos University. He has previously been resercher or lecturer at Madrikd Techn. University, Purdue, Duke, IIASA and CNR-IMATI. He is the youngest member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He has chaired the e-democracy programmes of the European Science Foundation and the Government of Madrid. He has ten books and nearly eighty refereed papers under his name. His current interests are in group decision support over the web, e-participation and Bayesian Analysis of stochastic processes.
Simon French is Professor of Information and Decision Sciences at Manchester Business School in the University of Manchester. He was previously Professor of Information Systems and Operational Research at the University of Leeds. He has an international reputation in decision theory, analysis and support systems, risk assessment and Bayesian statistics. He has over 120 publications to his name, including three standard texts on decision theory, and was from 1990 to 2000 founding editor of the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In all his work the emphasis is on multi-disciplinary approaches to solving real problems and the innovative use of technology in supporting decision making. Currently he is working on e-democracy and e-participation. He was a member of the European Science Foundation's Towards Electronic Democracy programme and is part of a major research project, funded under the UK Research Councils Rural Economy and Land Use Programme, into public and stakeholder participation into the handling of food chain issues in the rural economy.
