A well know danger of partipatory decision making is the "design by committee phenomen", a term "used to refer to suboptimal traits that such a process may produce as a result of having to compromise between the requirements and viewpoints of the participants, particularly in the presence of poor leadership or poor technical knowledge, such as needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee).

In the beginning of February we launched a discussion where we talk about what we did over the last months since the beginning of the Discuto project and what we are aiming at in terms of new features and new developments.

The idea of the discussion is to make clear to our users what we are doing and to benefit from their experience with the system on what should be done and what could be even removed from the system if it is unnecessary or harmful for the user’s experience.

In the introduction to their book „Managing Flow, A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm“, Nonaka/Toyama/Hirata are very sceptical about the use of IT for knowledge management. They write: „In the world of business practice, knowledge management first took the form of heavy investment in information technologies (IT), an approach that turned out to be painfully ineffective, if not a downright failure.

Today we will talk about the Discuto document parser and the way it transforms your document into a live discussion. There are some broad lines you will have to follow for the parser to do what you want and hopefully those are not too strict and can be followed without big changes to your document.  Some of those are standards you already follow in your normal docs.

In a recent article, Prieto-Martin et al (2012) voiced criticism over resource-intensive eParticipation projects organized by established institutions “top down” and advocated a low key grass roots approach “bottom up”. We want to look into this issue by comparing the results of a number of eParticipation projects managed by Cbased where documents were discussed and voted on the paragraph level by different types of communities.