Crowd-Scale Deliberation for Group Decision Making

Many of humanity’s most pressing and challenging problems - such as environmental degradation, physical and economic security, and public health - are inherently complex (involve many different interacting components) as well as widely impactful (effect many diverse stakeholders). Solving such problems requires crowd-scale deliberation in order to cover all the types of disciplinary expertise needed, as well as to take into account the many impacts the decision will have. Current approaches to group decision-making, however, fail at scale, producing outcomes that are needlessly sub-optimal for all the parties involved. This chapter will investigate why group decision-making fails in this way, explaining the problems of achieving Pareto optimality and noting the tendency to miss win-win solutions that are not the “dream choices” of any participant. It will go on to describe how recent advances in social computing technology can address these failings, for example through the use of deliberation maps, idea filtering, and crowd-scale complex negotiation