ConsensusWiki  Document-Development Website – Design Summary

Overview

Development of documents that refine and reflect group opinion poses several challenging tasks that an appropriate web-based system could greatly facilitate.  The ConsensusWiki system is designed to be such a system, providing an accessible, scalable, and efficient method for groups to develop documents.  It uses a variety of authoring and voting mechanisms, combined in a design informed by experience with several off-line collaboration processes. 

While the ConsensusWiki system makes extensive use of the consensus-building aspect of wiki-style openness and convergent discussion, it adds structure to this process in several ways.  Authorship of each proposed alternative is maintained, with changes in proposals made only by their authors (who can be individuals or groups with their own decision process).  Straw-poll and alternative-selection votes are also used to guide the process.  The development of consensus about the document content is encouraged and facilitated, but decisions can still be reached if consensus is not achieved.

            Each ConsensusWiki document is developed under a decision rule that defines the authority of each class of participants and the rules for invoking voting processes if needed to winnow the list of alternatives during the development process.  This rule is itself a document, of course, which could have been decided by prior use of the ConsensusWiki mechanism (the site provides a default rule for making rules, or one could be chosen by the legal authority for the organization by which the document is being developed).

            Each ConsensusWiki process is overseen by a document guide who makes the human-judgment procedural decisions called for in the document rule, and generally facilitates the process.  The guide also has authority to correct abuses and restrict access for users who do not follow the rules.  Guide decisions are subject to appeal to ratification by participant vote, so a guide must maintain the trust of most participants for the process to advance.  However, the guide need not have deep knowledge about the topic – that is supplied by the participants.  It may eventually be feasible to replace some guide functions (such as deciding when stage transi­tions are appropriate) by either automated analysis or by distributed moderation techniques.

Document rule options

            Participants:  The document rule specifies which entities have standing to participate.  These can be individuals or groups.  Groups have their own decision mechanisms, which can be separate uses of ConsensusWiki or simply action through designated agents.

            Identity:  The rule specifies how participant identity is established.  The usual mechanism is login by email with notification of any action taken (the email addresses used are supplied and controlled administratively, not by users, although users may add secondary addresses). 

            Stages:  Each ConsensusWiki process will proceed through several stages: [i] rule definition, [ii] generation of initial discussion of alternatives, [iii] winnowing to the primary alternatives, and (if specified by the document rule) [iv] final decisions.  These stages will emerge naturally in many cases, especially when a true consensus is within reach, but also the document guide can declare stage transitions, which are ratified by the participants according to the terms of the document rule.  Occasionally a guide may revert the process to an earlier stage.

            Timing:  The document rule specifies the minimum length of time that each stage takes, and how much notice participants have between when the guide declares a stage transition and when it takes effect.  This includes the response times for any voting mechanisms used.

            Voting:  The winnowing and final-decision stages require voting mechanisms.  These, including designation of quorum size if required, are specified in the document rule and can be whatever is felt to be appropriate for the application.  While some alternatives have to be chosen between by simple majority vote to be fair, it will often be productive to require a supermajority (such as two-thirds support) for final decisions.  This is the traditional way of ensuring that decisions are broadly supported.  In votes to identify the primary alternatives for further discussion, on the other hand, it may be appropriate to set a relatively low threshold (such as 10%).  To keep early voters from unduly influencing the outcome, the ConsensusWiki voting mechanisms display the amount of total vote (and the time remaining to vote) during the election, but do not display the individual results until the election is complete.

            Initial document version:  The document rule will provide at least a topic description, and may provide either a section outline or a full initial version (in which case a participant is designated as its author).  Areas known to be controversial may have alternatives stating the main choices listed even in the initial version, to prime the process and to communicate its impartiality.  Once the process is under way, however, new alternative proposals by participants have equal standing with the corresponding sections of the initial version.

Mechanisms to facilitate discussion

            Sectioning:  The guide specifies the basic arrangement of the document, and can rearrange it as needed to maintain a coherent development process.  This process also entails dividing the document into sections to which comments can be attached.  These sections will a hierarchy of various sizes, typically up to the entire document and down to at least the paragraph level.

            Subcommittees:  A document rule may provide that its guide can appoint subcommit­tees to work out proposed wording for some or all of the sections.  But the product of that work (which often is more than one alternative) reenters the development process for the overall document in the same way as an initial version, so further changes are still possible.

            Resource materials:  Participants can submit materials (or links to them) that they will refer to in their discussion of alternatives.  These will be accessible via a resource list that can be viewed grouped by subtopic, source, or category.  Often an initial set of resources will be provided with the topic definition.

Group action:  Individual participants may act for a group for which they are authorized agents, but notification of any persisting action (such as a vote or a comment) is also sent to all other people authorized to act for the group, as well as to people listed as monitors for that group.

Consensus-development cycle

            Authoring:  Authors remain in control of the language of any alternative versions they propose.  Usually they will modify their proposals during the process, in light of the balance of the comments made, to enhance its appeal in the final winnowing process.  Authors may with­draw their proposals at any time, which often is done in response to other proposals or to the trend of the comments.

            Collaborations:  Two or more participants may become joint authors of a proposal, in which case the agreement of all members of such a collaboration is required for subsequent changes in the proposal.  Proposed changes in a jointly-authored alternative are made visible to members of the collaboration as soon as they are submitted, but are not shown to others until approval is received from all the authors.  But authors may withdraw from a collaboration at any time and propose their own alternative for the same section.

            Listing precedence:  The order in which alternatives are listed is different in the initial and winnowing stages.  In the initial stage, alternatives are listed in order of length, shortest first (an “omit this section” alternative is thus always the first).  This encourages brevity and allays any concerns about favoritism in placement.  During the alternative-winnowing process, however, position reflects the straw-poll score, deemphasizing alternatives which have gathered little support.

            Commenting:  Participants may apply comments to either a topic section or to specific alternatives within that section.  Each section is associated with wiki pages that hold its comments, summaries of tagging for that section, and navigation to a history for that section and to comment pages for other parts of the document.

            Tags:  In addition to free-form comments, a quick-comment mechanism is provided in which participants can place one or more “tags” – words or short phrases selected from a stand­ard list (e.g., “Good idea”, “Too wordy”, “Not clear”).  Tags are provided to lower the threshold for comments and to enable automatic summarization of responses.  This provides scalable guidance to authors about how they might improve the clarity and attractiveness of proposals.  The tag list is specified in the document rule, and can be further customized by the guide.

Convergence mechanisms

            Winnowing:  If the document rule calls for more than the natural consensus that arises from the consensus-development cycle, the guide will begin the winnowing stage when the cycle of authors’ adjustments to the alternative proposals has stabilized.  Winnowing starts with a straw poll on the alternatives that will determine the order in which they are listed on the winnowing ballot.  Then, after a final round of discussion and adjustment by authors, the alternatives are voted on (using the voting method specified by the document rule), and those not meeting the support standard specified in the rule are dropped.  If appropriate the guide may, with ratification from participants, present some alternatives for decision prior to others which are logically dependent on them, or raise the retention threshold in multiple stages.

            Amendments:  When the rule calls for a final document to be created (rather than a set of all the alternatives attracting significant support), the winnowing process will continue until it produces a final draft document that reflects the substantive decisions.  But this draft may lack polish or still have some inconsistencies due to the differing sources of the alternatives.  As a final stage, perfecting amendments to the final draft may be proposed, with votes taken on those amendments that attract the number of co-sponsors called for in the document rule.  After consideration of all qualifying amendments, a final vote is taken on whether to adopt the final document, to reject it, or to return it to the alternative-generation stage for further work.

Recursive applications of the ConsensusWiki process

·   Generate the document-development agenda for an organization.

·   Decide on the rule under which a document will be developed.

·   Have multiple subgroups develop results in parallel, then repeat the process with subgroup represent­atives as participants and the subgroups results as the initial set of alternatives.

·   Use results from a subgroup as input to consideration by the group with decision authority.

— Hunter Ellinger (ellinger@io.com) 4/6/07 version —