Abstract
Consensus-building is an essential process for the success of co-design projects. To build consensus, stakeholders need to discuss conflicting needs and viewpoints, converge their ideas toward shared interests, and grow their willingness to commit to group decisions. However, managing group discussions is challenging in large co-design projects with multiple stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate the interaction design of a chatbot that can mediate consensus-building conversationally. By interacting with individual stakeholders, the chatbot collects ideas to satisfy conflicting needs and engages stakeholders to consider others’ viewpoints, without having stakeholders directly interact with each other. Results from an empirical study in an educational setting (N = 12) suggest that the approach can increase stakeholders’ commitment to group decisions and maintain the effect even on the group decisions that conflict with personal interests. We conclude that chatbots can facilitate consensus-building in small-to-medium-sized projects, but more work is needed to scale up to larger projects.
Probably one of the first testing out this idea. Goal is to boost stakeholders’ willingness to accept group decisions without them being in direct communication with each other.
Rule-based chatbot asks what will benefit the group, presents other members’ ideas, requests seeing ideas from others’ perspective, and asks individuals to contribute by selecting one of the ideas.
Results indicate that interacting with a chatbot increased stakeholders’ willingness to commit to group decisions by eliciting the perceived joint effort and fairness, even in the group decisions that conflict with one’s own opinions.