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Perspegrity Solutions -- Increasing the quality of connection and decision making in online work, learning, and community -- |
Excepts from
"Technology for Collaborative Decision Making in
People-Centered Multiple-Bottom-Line Organizations"
Existing collaborative technologies do not go far enough in supporting "human-centric," or "people-centered multiple-bottom-line" decision-making. These are for groups that aim for deep participation ("deep democracy") with a fundamental goal of meeting multiple human needs (not only financial gain). Human-centric decision-making values and explicitly deals with diverse needs and opinions. On-line software can display and facilitate processes and models that support "elements of healthy decision making" such as mission-orientation, trust, reflection, diversity, transparency, inclusion, inquiry, reality-checking, and follow-up. We plan to build software designed to support the following characteristics of group decision-making processes:
- Transparency and inclusiveness in tasks such as setting meeting agendas.
- An organic flow between convergent (focusing) and divergent (brainstorming, generative) problem solving phases.
- Decision making follow-through and follow-up; including clear roles and responsibilities.
- Individual and whole-group reflection and awareness ("big picturing", regular checks on progress and focus, "points of order" and other meta-comments, post-meeting evaluations).
- Multi-directional flow of information and flow of control .Supporting Decisions, Teams, and Tasks
The OnlineCommunity web software will be designed to help members of a
community collaborate and get things done. "Getting things
done" requires support for three things not addressed in
most other community-building web sites: decision making, teams, and tasks.
So in addition to the more commonly seen tools for dialog and information
sharing, our software has:
- Enhanced support for group decision making. Getting things done requires group processes that move beyond dialog into decision making. Our tools support collective participation in decision making.
- Sub-group and team support. Getting things done requires assigning issues or tasks to focused sub-groups. Our tools make it easy to organize people into groups, each of whom has a separate area for its dialog, information sharing, and decision making.
- Task-oriented activities. Getting things done requires moving beyond dialog and decision making and into action. Successful engagement in actionable tasks involves managing: goals, roles and responsibilities, sub-parts of tasks, and the current or follow-up status of tasks. Our tools support multi-step tasks and multi-step decision making processes with sub-tasks.
More at: Murray, T. & Benander, L. (2005). Technology for Collaborative Decision Making in People-Centered Multiple-Bottom-Line Organizations (pdf).
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