Abstract
In this study, we examined disagreement, agreement, and elaboration (rationale sharing) and their association with idea generation in a crowdsourced deliberation that took place within a crowdsourced policymaking process led by a national government. We analyzed the comments posted to the crowdsourced deliberation process and found that the elaboration of perspectives was a key element in idea generation. Disagreement contributed to ideation most when it was elaborated—i.e., when the participants justified their stances—and when it was accompanied by elaborated agreement. The findings suggest that in the design of the technologies and processes facilitating crowdsourced policymaking and other applications for civic engagement, there should be a particular focus on encouraging elaboration because elaboration can contribute to productive ideation as well as constructive argumentation. Elaboration could be fostered by deploying features from deliberation and argumentation technologies, which are designed to encourage participants to elaborate on their stances.
Their deliberative practice is crowdsourced policymaking where local and national governments engage citizens and gather ideas and knowledge to improve policies. They define crowdsourced deliberation as an asynchronous, distributed, and self-selected form of deliberation (reasoned argument exchange characterized by respect and reciprocity among the participants), and idea crowdsourcing (gathering idea contributions from online crowds). They focus on three features in deliberation: disagreement, agreement, and elaboration.
They use a crowdsourced law reform process led by Finland, coded them, and analyzed comments with inferential statistics.
They found that simultaneous presence of disagreement and agreement in comments was more strongly positively associated with idea generation than the presence of either disagreement or agreement alone or the absence of both. Moreover, the simultaneous presence of elaborated disagreement and elaborated agreement had the strongest positive association with idea generation. This suggests that elaboration accompanying dis/agreement—already considered an important marker of deliberative quality—can also contribute to idea generation in crowdsourced deliberation. They also find that disagreement can play a constructive role as long as it is civil and elaborated.
They implicate that elaboration should be prioritized for productive ideation and constructive argumentation.