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The Workshop on Argumentation Technology for Policy Deliberations will present the results of the European FP7 IMPACT Project, along with invited talks by leading developers and users of argumentation tools for supporting public participation in policy deliberations on the World-Wide-Web.

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIt's affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Attempt at massive online deliberation, now defunct. Non-mathematically fair, but it seems to have mapped the civil society's priorities somewhat. 

The lack of shared expert knowledge capacity in the U.S. Congress has created a critical weakness in our democratic process.Along with bipartisan cooperation, many contemporary and urgent questions before our legislators require nuance, genuine deliberation and expert judgment. Congress, however, is missing adequate means for this purpose and depends on outdated and in some cases antiquated systems of information referral, sorting, communicating, and convening.

also saw that in PIN mailing list

YourView aspires to give Australians a stronger democratic voice. It has the unique ambition to present what we really think about major public issues, and giving that collective wisdom a role in the national political discourse. By "what we really think" we mean the considered collective viewpoint - ideally what Australians as a whole would think if they were better informed about major public issues and if they had more time to reflect and deliberate about those issues. YourView's aims are thus consistent with those of the deliberative democracy movement.

The purpose of the project is to create and convene an interdisciplinary network of thinkers and doers that could help with making the transition from closed-and-centralized to open-and-collaborative institutions of governance.

On September 15th 3000 citizens from 25 countries took part in a global event: "World Wide Views on Biodiversity". The project engages ordinary citizens in the process of policymaking and awareness raising to sustain a living and healthy planet. About hundred citizens in each participating country attended day-long meetings to learn about biodiversity issues, make up their minds about them, and express their views. They all voted on a set of predefined questions and the answers will be presented at COP11 in India in October 2012.

"This study investigates the ethical aspects of deploying and researching into so-called climate engineering methods, i.e. large-scale technical interventions in the climate system with the objective of offsetting anthropogenic climate change. The moral reasons in favour of and against R&D into and deployment of CE methods are analysed by means of argument maps."

An anthology of essays from the McKinsey Center for Government (written by political leaders, civil servants, economists and policy experts) exploring the approaches that governments around the world are taking to common, emerging problems.

Debatepedia is the Wikipedia of debates - an encyclopedia of pro and con arguments and quotes on critical issues. A project of the 501c3 non-profit International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Debatepedia utilizes the same wiki technology powering Wikipedia to centralize arguments and quotes found in editorials, op-eds, political statements, and books into comprehensive pro/con articles. This helps citizens and decision-makers better deliberate on the world's most important questions. Debatepedia is endorsed by the National Forensic League.

A new generation of Collective Intelligence (CI) technologies, adopted by public and private sector organizations, offers "the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate and invent".

Uh... collective intelligence in organizations sounds a bit creepy, like "We are the Borg".