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    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>MOOD: Massive Open Online Deliberation Platform A practical application</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ilse Verdiesen</string-name>
          <email>ep.verdiesen@student.tudelft.nl</email>
        </contrib>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Nowadays, public debates often take place on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter and can be characterized as asynchronous, protracted and ill-structured. The Massive Open Online Deliberation (MOOD) platform aims to structure these debates. Essential is that the platform can differentiate between the moral acceptability and the social acceptance of a debate outcome. We briefly describe the e-deliberation process and look at two existing debate platforms, Liquidfeedback and Debatehub. We design and build a prototype that mainly focuses on: (1) a method to differentiate and validate facts and opinions, and (2) a mechanism that maps both the social acceptance and the moral acceptability of debate outcomes. We research these ethical concepts more in depth and implement several techniques, such as a voting mechanism, in a working prototype that supports a four stage deliberation process. In future applications, machine learning techniques can be integrated in the platform to perform sentiment analysis on a debate.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        Public deliberation is an important component of decision-making
in a democracy. Deliberation can result in an increased likelihood of
justifiable policies, can help to identify incompatible moral values
and can help people to get a broader perspective on policy questions
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]. The internet could be a valuable medium for public
deliberation, because it can be a tool for information dissemination and long
distance communication [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ]. It allows citizens to share their
opinion more easily. However, the debates that are currently held on the
internet often take place on social media platforms like Facebook
or Twitter and can therefore be characterized as asynchronous,
protracted and ill-structured. E-deliberation platforms aim to structure
these debates and their respective outcomes. These outcomes can be
used by policy makers to make better decisions. In the field of ethics,
the differentiation between social acceptance and moral acceptability
is essential for the judgment on policies. Furthermore, public debates
can be marginally ethical, as they occasionally contain
discriminating content, and have statements that can be accepted, or not, by a
majority of the crowd [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. An example of this is a debate on banning
polluting vehicles in the city center. This proposal can be accepted by
local residents, but unaccepted by downtown business owners. Also,
one could question if it is morally acceptable to prohibit access to
city centers for potential customers and suppliers of businesses. On
the other hand, for local residents the air quality is very important.
Edeliberation platforms facilitate debates which should take the views
of both the majority as the minority into account, and therefore strive
to be ethically just [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. However, existing platforms often lack the
ability to do so. In this paper, we propose our vision of a refined
e-deliberation platform that takes into account the shortcomings of
existing platforms by proposing a conceptual design and working
prototype.
      </p>
      <p>The paper is structured as follows: in section 2 we introduce the
theoretical concepts underlying our design, describe related work
in the field of deliberation processes and we analyze some existing
platforms that support these processes. Section 3 shows the design
choices and the methodologies used for our prototype. In section 4
we demonstrate the implementation and give insight in the
framework we used to develop the platform. In the final section we discuss
the limitations of our work and provide direction for further research.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>In this section we describe the differentiation between facts and
values, the concept of moral acceptability and social acceptance, and the
e-deliberation process in general. We also look at two existing
platforms that support this process. We analyze their shortcomings and
based on these, we state the aspects we have focused on in the design
of our prototype.
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Facts and values</title>
      <p>
        The distinction between facts and values is a much-debated concept
in the world of ethics. Many philosophers have had their thoughts on
how to filter descriptive statements from normative statements.
Descriptive statements, also referred to as factual statements, describe
factual matters and can be used to assert, deny or communicate about
facts [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. Normative statements, which can also be viewed as value
judgments, deal with how people judge human decisions and
conduct [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ]. They are concerned with how people value factual matters
and circumstances. We adhere to this distinction in developing our
prototype.
2.2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Moral acceptability</title>
      <p>
        Morality is concerned with the distinction between right and wrong
and contains principles for good and bad behavior. These principles
depend on the political, cultural and religious context they are
defined in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. They govern our thoughts, emotions and behavior and
can be viewed at a personal, interpersonal or collective level [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ].
Morality can also be studied on a system level from a more functional
approach and can be described as: ‘Moral systems are interlocking
sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions,
technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together
to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.’ [8,
p. 368]. This systematic approach resulted in the Moral Foundations
Theory which uses a moral reasoning model based on the principles
of harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and purity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. We use
these principles to define the moral acceptability of the alternatives
proposed in the debate process.
2.3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Social acceptance</title>
      <p>
        Social acceptance is a combination of individual feelings, perceived
benefits and risks and above all, it is a social process in which people
are influenced by various types of interactions. Views and available
information are important for social acceptance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Research shows
that indicators for social acceptance are knowledge, fear and
perceptions of the public [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. We found that literature on measuring social
acceptance is scarce. We turned to the field of ethics and looked at
the Social Choice theory which provides a theoretical framework to
reach a collective decision on social welfare. This theory is based on
combining individual opinions, preferences and interests of people
and links welfare economics and voting theory to aggregate
preferences and behaviors of individuals. We define social acceptance as
the collective decision on the preferences of individuals.
2.4
      </p>
      <p>
        (E)-deliberation
In this paper, we define deliberation as a critical examination of a
certain issue where the examination is based on the weighting of
proand con arguments for that issue. A deliberative process allows
multiple participants to receive and exchange information, to critically
examine this information, to form a collective judgment (based on
the provided information) about a certain issue, which determines
the decision-making on a certain issue [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. E-deliberation platforms
are platforms that make use of the modern online communication
technologies to support such a deliberation process. The platforms
capture collective judgments regarding complex social and political
issues, such as decision-making over referendums, trade treaties and
the use of killer-robots. These platforms intend to overcome
legitimacy problems that may arise in public debates and public
decisionmaking in controversial and adversarial arenas. E-deliberation
platforms can be used to structure these deliberation processes by
providing logic to support reasoning, voting procedures and reputation
mechanisms [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. E-deliberation platforms can be used by decision
makers and citizens, to receive the opinions and information from
debate participants on certain topics. For example, a decision maker
might use it to introduce legislative proposals to citizens and to
subsequently see how citizens evaluate these proposals via the collective
judgment of the crowd.
2.5
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Analysis of existing e-deliberation platforms</title>
      <p>In order to get an understanding of the characteristics of the
available e-deliberation platforms and to see if these platforms can be
refined, we analyzed two existing platforms; LiquidFeedback and
Debate Hub. We choose these two platforms because, in our opinion,
these are two of the most investigated platforms and we were
constrained by a limited amount of research time. In this analysis we
mainly focused on how the deliberative process is implemented, how
the collective judgments of the crowd are formed and how facts and
values are differentiated and evaluated in order to identify gaps in the
existing platforms which we use as input for our prototype.
2.5.1</p>
      <sec id="sec-6-1">
        <title>LiquidFeedback</title>
        <p>
          LiquidFeedback is designed and built by the Public Software Group
of Berlin. The deliberation process consists of four phases; the
admission phase, the discussion phase, the verification phase and the
voting phase, where each phase has a fixed amount of time. Users
of the platform can initiate a debate by proposing a certain issue, for
example ‘What should the town council do in order to improve the
air quality in the city center?’. Proposing of issues takes place in the
admission phase, where users can support certain issues by voting. In
the next step of the admission phase participants can provide
alternatives to the proposed issues. An example of an alternative for the
earlier described issue could be ‘Polluting vehicles should be banned
from the city center in the weekend’. A discussion on a topic
follows after a issue reached a certain quorum of votes in the admission
phase. A discussion consists of the earlier mentioned alternatives and
suggestions provided by discussants to improve the proposed
alternatives. Users who provided issues and alternatives can choose to
update their draft versions, based on the provided suggestions. After
the discussion phase, discussants enter the verification phase. In the
verification phase it is not possible anymore to change the draft
alternatives, although new alternatives can still be added to the list of
alternatives. At the end of the verification phase, users need to vote
again on the list of alternatives. Only the alternatives that reached a
certain quorum enter the next phase, which is the voting phase. This
second quorum reduces the workload for participants in the voting
phase. In the voting phase, participants can vote against of in favor
of remaining alternatives which have passed the second quorum [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ].
The voting mechanism for this last phase is conform the Schulze
method, which will be explained in section 3.4 of this paper. An
advantage of the Schulze method is that it takes minorities into account,
so that alternatives that have a low amount of votes still have chance
to reach the quorum.
        </p>
        <p>
          LiquidFeedback is a well substantiated e-deliberation platform.
However, we found that it could be improved in some areas. Firstly,
LiquidFeedback does not elaborate on the differentiation of facts and
values. If someone provides an alternative in the first three phases
of the deliberation process, where is this alternative based on? Is it
based on an opinion of someone, or is it based on a fact with
corresponding literature? The platform does not explain how facts and
opinions (values) are differentiated and how facts and
corresponding sources are evaluated. Secondly, the platform does not
differentiate in the outcome between social acceptance and moral
acceptability. Social acceptance and moral acceptability often differ and that
differentiation is important for decision-making and judgment [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
          ].
The exact differences will be defined in section 3.2 and 3.3. Thirdly,
in our opinion is LiquidFeedback a platform where participants can
only provide alternatives for certain issues and subsequently modify
these alternatives when participants do not support them. We miss
a debate structure which is more focused on providing pro-and con
arguments with facts and corresponding literature, just like is done
during a ”real world” offline debate. These aspects are in our opinion
crucial for a well-structured deliberation process, because requiring
participants to add literature could result in a deliberation process of
higher quality.
2.5.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-6-2">
        <title>Debate Hub</title>
        <p>The second existing platform we analyzed is Debate Hub. This
platform is an initiative from the Open University’s Knowledge
Management Institute. The platform consists of debates where people can
provide debate topics, alternatives, and arguments. It does not have
a well-defined deliberation process with different phases and fixed
amounts of time as LiquidFeedback has, however, it has some
sequence which users have to follow. The first step is initiating a debate
topic or issue, such as the example provided in section 2.2.1; ‘What
should the town council do in order to improve the air quality in the
city center?’. After that, participants can add alternatives, like;
‘Polluting vehicles should be banned from the city center in the weekend’.
Consequently, participants can add pro-or con arguments to these
alternatives. The structure of the argument form allows participants to
add literature to their arguments. Participants can vote on alternatives
and arguments, but there is no voting mechanism that filters out the
most accepted alternatives or arguments like LiquidFeedback has.</p>
        <p>After analyzing Debate Hub, we found that Debate Hub has a very
different setup compared to LiquidFeedback, since it does not have a
deliberation process with distinctive phases and fixed times. The
debates pages are more like forms to structure an online debate. In our
opinion, the following aspects could be improved; firstly, there is no
quorum for initiating a debate. By not implementing a quorum, there
will be many debates without any participants. Secondly, although
there is some distinction between facts and values, the facts are not
validated. Thirdly, there is no distinction between social acceptance
and moral acceptability. Users only can show their support for
certain alternatives or arguments, but it is not clear how users evaluate
the moral acceptability of certain alternatives or arguments. Lastly,
there is no voting method that takes minorities into account.
2.6</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Discussion related work</title>
      <p>Based on the previous section we can conclude that the two analyzed
platforms are complete, but have drawbacks in some areas.
LiquidFeedback has a deliberation process with distinctive phases in which
results of the most accepted alternatives are listed, while Debate Hub
has a very clear way of structuring the debate itself by letting users
provide debate topics or issues, alternatives and pro-and con
arguments (just like in ”real world ” offline debates). We built a prototype
that focuses on the one hand on combining the best of both platforms
(by using parts of the debate page structure of Debate Hub and by
using parts of the deliberation process of LiquidFeedback) and on
the other hand on aspects of both platforms that could be improved.
We defined a design objective for our prototype which is based on
the earlier described analysis. Our design objective mainly focuses
on the following aspects: (1) a method to differentiate and validate
facts and opinions, and (2) a mechanism that supports both the social
acceptance and the moral acceptability of debate outcomes.
3</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>METHODOLOGY</title>
      <p>In this section we describe the methodologies we used in our
deliberation process design and we state which methods we implemented
in our platform.
3.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>Facts and values</title>
      <p>
        The goal of differentiating between facts and values for our system
is to have a clear discussion that is based on facts, and let
participants have a discussion over values which are derived from those
facts. We think that by keeping the structure of the debate page of
Debate Hub, we are able to structure the debate in such a way that
participants have to provide a fact with the corresponding source for
every argument they make. The structure of the page where people
can add an argument with facts requires users to add a URL which
supports their facts. This will be explained in section 4.1 in more
detail. To validate the facts and sources provided by participants, we
use the methodology of online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia
implemented crowd-sourcing technology, where users (the crowd or
editors) have the responsibility of (1) adding content to the
encyclopedia and (2) validating all of the content. This is done by panels of
experts. The composition of these panels is formed throughout the
existence of the website. Groups of active editors are specialized in
certain topics, and if false content on certain pages exists, they will
correct this content [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ]. We incorporate this concept in our platform,
by letting users report on facts they think are not correct. If a fact
reaches a certain amount of so-called report votes, a group of users
will be notified to check this fact. This group of users is randomly
selected and they have the responsibility to validate the reported fact
and/ or source. If they are not able to judge if a fact is correct or
incorrect, they can inform a group of users which are expert in the
field of where the source comes from. We propose a two step
procedure with a randomly selected panel and an expert panel to limit the
workload for the expert panel. In other words, the validation of facts
in this methodology relies on the wisdom of the crowd. We realize
that this methodology might be vulnerable for groupthink and
strategic behavior, but we think that Wikipedia proves that the wisdom of
the crowd works, if implemented correctly.
3.2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>Moral acceptability</title>
      <p>
        To survey the moral acceptability of the alternatives we use the Moral
Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) that was developed [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] based on
the Moral Foundation Theory. The MFQ can be used to measure a
broad range of moral concerns. The MFQ consists of two parts, one
about moral relevance and the other one is about moral judgment. We
intended to use the fifteen questions of the first part as an instrument
to assess the moral acceptability of the proposed alternatives in the
debates. We performed a small test to check the understandability of
the questions. It turned out that the questions in their original form
were hard to understand by the testers and did not fit the way we
want to measure the alternatives. Therefore we decided to adjust the
MFQ questions slightly to make them more applicable to our design
of the debate process and understandable for the user. An example of
this modification is the rephrasing the statement Whether or not some
people were treated differently than others into the question: Do you
think that as a result of the alternative above: Someone is treated
differently from others? We realize that this impacts the validity of
this instrument which means that research is needed to validate the
modified questions. Since our prototype is merely a proof of concept
we chose not to test this validity at this moment.
3.3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>Social acceptance</title>
      <p>As described in paragraph 2.3, the Social Choice theory takes the
preferences of individuals into account, therefore we regard it as a
suitable means to measure social acceptance. We studied several
voting mechanisms that are being used in Social Choice Theory and
chose to implement one to determine the social acceptance of the
alternatives of the debates. These voting mechanisms are described in
the next paragraph.
3.4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>Voting mechanisms</title>
      <p>
        Voting is a popular method to reach a joint decision based on
aggregated preferences of individuals. One of the most used voting
mechanisms in elections is the Schulze method which is used by Ubuntu,
several Pirate Party political parties, OpenStack and LiquidFeedback
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. This preferential voting method satisfies among others the
criteria of anonymity, the Condorcet criterion and independence of clones
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. Voters can list their preferences anonymously which is an
important prerequisite for elections. The Condorcet criterion selects a
single winner by majority rule in pairwise comparisons over every
other candidates. Clone independence is a criterion that prevents
certain types of strategic behavior in the voting process which means
that it is impossible to be insincere about a voter’s real preferences
in order to secure a more favorable outcome. In the Schulze method
every voter submits an ordered preference list for the candidates
presented to the voter. All candidates are compared pairwise and a
directed graph with the strongest path is created based on all votes and
pair-wised comparisons. The output can be determined by looking
which candidate defeated all other candidates and this one is declared
the winner [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Next to the Schulze method we considered to implement the
Ranked pairs algorithm, because this method is even more robust
to strategic behavior [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ] and it satisfies most of the same criteria as
the Schulze method. Both are Condorcet methods, but they produce
a different order of winners due to the fact that the Schulze algorithm
reverses a larger majority than the Ranked Pairs algorithm for the
majorities on which the two orders of finish disagree [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. We found
that there is less information available about the Ranked pairs
algorithm than about the Schulze method. Ranked pairs is also harder to
understand which negatively impacts the transparency of the voting
mechanism. Therefore, we chose to implement the Schulze method
in our prototype and used the PHP library of Julien Boudry that was
available on GitHub [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. We analyzed and tested the implementation
of this algorithm with voting example to determine if the open-source
algorithm was correct, which it turned out to be.
4
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-13">
      <title>IMPLEMENTATION</title>
      <p>In this section we describe the techniques we implemented in our
prototype that we developed in the ten weeks of our Information
Architecture design project course. We explain our choices for the
framework we used and sketch our plan to test our application.
4.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-14">
      <title>MOOD deliberation process</title>
      <p>In our prototype we implemented the actual e-deliberation process
based on the methods described in the previous section. We built a
deliberation process consisting four stages: (1) proposal and
initiation of a debate, (2) the actual debate in which user can cast votes
to support an alternative, (3) the selection of alternatives via
preference voting and measuring the moral acceptability of the alternatives
and (4) reporting of the results. These stages are depicted in figure 1
which are translated to the application in the overview of the debate
page in figure 2.</p>
      <p>
        In stage one, a user can initiate a debate by submitting a proposal
to the MOOD platform. This proposal needs to be described in a
generic way and should preferably be posed as an open question. The
initiator has four weeks to raise support for the debate and to reach
a voting threshold. We set the threshold with an initial value of ten
votes, but we will have to test if this value proves to be correct. The
threshold procedure resembles the procedure for citizen initiatives
in The Netherlands [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. After reaching the voting threshold the
proposal enters stage two of the debate. Once the threshold is reached,
an initiator cannot withdraw his proposed debate, because this would
mean that all aspects of a certain debate, like arguments, sources and
facts, will be deleted and to our opinion valuable information will be
lost.
      </p>
      <p>In stage two the actual debate is held. Discussants can react to
a debate by submitting alternatives which consist of pro- and con
arguments (figure 3). It is also possible for users to add pro- or con
arguments to an existing alternative. Arguments need to be
substantiated by facts and sources to reference these facts to differentiate them
from values. Although not built in our prototype yet, these facts will
be validated by means of crowd-sourcing. The facts can be contested
by other users and if a certain threshold is reached, the administrator
will review the fact. If the fact is not valid then it will be marked
in the database as rejected and will not be visible to the users. In a
future version of the MOOD platform an expert panel will take over
this task from the administrator to provide a more independent
judgment of a contested fact. A debate will have a pre-set duration which
is set by the initiator. In this stage, all users can vote to support an
alternative. The five top alternatives will be selected and the debate
will enter the next phase.</p>
      <p>In the third stage of the debate, a voter can list his or her
preferences of alternatives. The preferences are calculated by the Schulz
voting mechanism. By this, the social acceptance of the alternatives
in a debate is measured. After the voting, a list of alternatives is
created ranking the alternatives that received the most votes. Next, the
moral acceptability of the alternatives is surveyed with questions that
are based on the MFQ for the selected alternatives. Per alternative
seven questions will be asked to measure the ethical principles of
harm, fairness and authority. The answers will be used to gain insight
in the moral acceptability of the different alternatives in a debate.</p>
      <p>
        In the fourth and final stage the social acceptance and moral
acceptability results of the debate will be presented (figure 4). The
results will be available to all users which will enhance the
transparency of the debate.
We chose an open-source framework to develop our prototype,
because it is easily available and it enhances the transparency and
traceability of our platform. We used the free open-source PHP
framework Laravel to build the prototype. This framework is available on
GitHub and can be used under the terms of a MIT license.
According to their official website, it can be used to build elegant web
applications that are ’...delivered at warp speed.’ [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]. It is developed
via a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. This is a category
of software applications that consists of three interconnected parts
that separate the internal representation of information from the way
the information is presented to the user. The Model component
handles the data, logic and rules of the application and stores the data
it receives from the controller. The View shows the output of the
application and generates new output when the model changes. The
Controller accepts and converts the input into commands for the
model and the view [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. Laravel is one of the most popular PHP
frameworks at this moment and includes features, such as a
Composer architecture for Artisan, Laravel’s Command Line Interface,
Eloquent Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) to put constraints on
the relationships between database objects and Query builder to
program queries automatically [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. To create the database we used the
open-source PHPMyAdmin software that handles MySQL queries
for the web [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]. We used bootstrap to adjust the layout of the web
application dynamically to the (mobile) device of the user. This free
and open-source library is hosted on GitHub. Using bootstrap we aim
to enhance the user experience for our prototype.
4.3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-15">
      <title>Testing</title>
      <p>At the time that we are writing this paper we did not test our web
application yet. Our first test will focus on the usability of our
application. We will ask a small group of individuals (3-5 people) to
walk through our application via scenario testing. The test scenario
focuses on the e-deliberation process of our application. We ask our
testers to follow this scenario to see if they understand the different
steps in the process and to assess if the application is easy to use. The
scenario starts by asking the user to make a new account and
subsequently login with this account. After that, our testers will propose a
new debate in the first stage of our deliberation process. Next, testers
have to work themselves to the different stages, by adding
alternatives, arguments, facts and sources in stage 2, by ranking the most
social acceptable alternatives in stage 3, by filling in the survey on
moral acceptability and by viewing the results in stage 4. We already
prepared some debate issues in stage 2, like ”No fast food should
be sold in the University canteen, because it leads to obesity”. We
have designed two different kind of setups for our scenario. In the
first setup, we will provide users with some explanation and a clear
walk-trough description which describes every step in the scenario.
In the second setup, we ask our testers to follow the same steps as
in the first setup, but we give them very minimal explanation and no
clear walk-trough description. We ask them to think out loud while
performing the scenario with the second setup. The results of our test
will be available after this paper is drafted, therefore these are not
included in this document right now.
5</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-16">
      <title>CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION</title>
      <p>In this paper we gave an overview of the e-deliberation process and
existing platforms Liquidfeedback and Debatehub. We built a
prototype that focuses on the one hand on combining the best of both
platforms (by using parts of the debate page structure of
Debatehub and by using parts of the deliberation process of
Liquidfeedback) and on the other hand on aspects of both platforms that could
be improved. Our design objective mainly focuses on the following
aspects: (1) a method to differentiate and validate facts and
opinions, and (2) a mechanism that supports both the social acceptance
and the moral acceptability of debate outcomes. We researched these
concepts more in depth and implemented several techniques to meet
these aspects which resulted in a working prototype.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-17">
      <title>Limitations</title>
      <p>Due to the little available development time, our prototype has
several limitations. We focused our research on the topics of the
differentiation between facts and values, social acceptance, moral
acceptability and voting mechanisms. Time lacked to extensively study
these topics and we realize that this scoping can lead to conformation
bias, which means that we only used literature that substantiates our
ideas and did not consider alternative views. The time constraint also
affected the features of our prototype. One of the features that we did
not manage to implement, is that of reputation score to distinguish
between experts of certain discussion topics and regular users. This
distinction is useful to create expert panels to validate the contesting
of facts in the stage of the actual debate. Another feature we did not
implement is an algorithm that creates a random panel to evaluate a
contested fact. In the current application this task is performed by the
administrator. Furthermore, a limitation is that we modified the MFQ
questionnaire, but we did not study the effect of this instrument. Next
to this, we chose to run the application on a small centralised server
of the University which limits the amount of users that can
simultaneously take part in the debate and impacts the scalability. To
accommodate more users, a distributed or cloud server is needed to upscale
the application in the future. Finally, we made a trade-off regarding
the privacy of users and security of the platform. A limitation of our
current design is that an administrator or auditor can trace a vote
back to a user who casted it. Although, this violates the anonymity
requirement of voting, this information is only visible for an
administrator or auditor and not for any other user. More importantly, it
enables full traceability, which contributes to more transparency and
credibility via audits of the voting results. It is not possible for users
to see how often is voted on alternatives in stage two to limit
strategic behaviour which could occur when an alternative received many
votes and people might want to vote on an alternative that is
popular. Nevertheless, strategic behaviour could occur when users register
with multiple e-mail addresses in order to be able to cast more votes.
We have not been able to implement a counter measure for this in our
prototype.
5.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-18">
      <title>Future research</title>
      <p>These limitations lead to recommendations for future work. We did
not manage to study the revised MFQ questions. Its validity and
applicability to measure moral acceptability in debates should be
researched. We also recommend to extent the literature study for
mechanisms to differentiate between facts and values, for social
acceptance, moral acceptability and voting mechanisms and find alternate
views on these topics. An extension of the voting stage would also
be a possible addition to a future version of the application. Adding
a second round of preferential voting, after the publication of the
results of the moral acceptability survey, would allow people to change
their mind and vote for a different alternative than they did the first
time. We did not manage to include all features in our prototype that
we described in our list of requirements. A mechanism for
crowdsourcing should be added to categorize the facts that are added to the
debate. Next to this, it should be possible to forward a contested fact
to an expert panel for an independent judgment. Also, tracking the
reputation score of users should be added as a feature to our
prototype. These features are crucial to develop the MOOD platform into a
more mature application. Additionally, sentiment analysis on content
provided by the users could be implemented in the MOOD platform
to sense the atmosphere of the debate. On the other hand machine
learning techniques can also be used to support the MOOD platform.
For example validate facts by means of crowd-sourcing applications
or Watson APIs.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-19">
      <title>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</title>
      <p>We would like to thank Dirk Helbing for his thoughts and input to
our prototype.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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