Intelligent Deliberation (IDea)
The Knowledge Media Institute’s IDea Group investigates theories, methods and tools accounting for the centrality of social interaction and discourse in public engagement, urban informatics, e-democracy and social innovation contexts. Our research focuses on models of dialogue and argumentation; models of crowdsourcing and participatory representation; and the design, implementation and uptake of online systems that seek to increase collective environmental awareness, and collective capacity to make sense of complex issues, such as social justice and environmental sustainability.
In the past 10 years, the IDea group has launched the Collective Intelligence for The Common Good Open Research and Action Community Network and successfully deployed new Web technologies for Citizen Engagement in Public Deliberation and Collective Intelligence Platforms for Social Innovation, such as: (Cohere, the EvidenceHub, LiteMap, DebateHub, CIdashboard, Democratic Reflection and Democratic Replay). The research group has constantly contributed to international research on Collective Intelligence and Online Deliberation, hosted at prominent HCI conference venues such as CSCW (2012), CHI2015 and C&T (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019).
Our research has lead to high profile projects such as: the FP7 project CATALYST on Collective Applied Intelligence and Analytics for Social Innovation, which specifically tackled issues of large scale communities’ involvement in social innovation initiatives; the EDV project, (Elections Debate Visualisations), an EPSRC funded project which produced advanced video replays of the televised UK election debates and new ways to harness audience feedback to political debates, at scale and through ubiquitous and interactive technologies.
