=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-482/paper-6
|storemode=property
|title=Towards a Platform for Online Mediation
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-482/Paper_6.pdf
|volume=Vol-482
|authors=Pablo Noriega,Carlos López
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icail/NoriegaL09
}}
==Towards a Platform for Online Mediation==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-482/Paper_6.pdf
Towards a Platform for Online Mediation
Pablo Noriega1and Carlos López1
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Campus UAB,
08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain
{pablo,clopez}@iiia.csic.es
Abstract: In this paper we describe a prototype for a generic platform to
support actual on-line mediation. The immediate purpose of the prototype is to
provide working examples of the computer artifacts that may be implemented
to support current and foreseeable mediation practices. The ultimate objective,
however, is to facilitate the deployment of appropriate ODR environments. The
proposal is motivated by the production of the White Book on Mediation in
Catalonia commissioned by the Catalan Government. This paper illustrates
how different ODR processes—such as negotiation protocols of different types,
arbitration or non-intrusive mediation—plus the preparatory and ancillary sub
processes—like convening the parties, caucuses, anonymous proposal
registration, mediator selection—may be specified and then assembled into
more or less elaborate mediation support systems tailored to the needs and
preferences of each mediation provider. This proposal is based on the notion of
electronic institution and is being implemented using the IIIA's EIDE platform.
Keywords: Mediation, electronic institution, multiagent systems.
1. Introduction
There is widespread agreement about the need of alternative dispute resolution
procedures to address the overflow of litigation that is received by courts. There is
also agreement about the convenience of supporting some of these ADR procedures
through on-line dispute resolution technologies. This paper explores these two
matters through the design of a generic mediation platform that may be tailored to the
specific needs of different mediation domains and modalities. The platform we
propose is based on the notion of electronic institution and assembled through the
EIDE tools developed in the IIIA. 1
The paper is organized as follows. We first sketch the type of IT technology that is
currently being used for on-line mediation and explain the mediation environment
that motivates the proposal. In Section 3 we give a brief description of the “Electronic
Institution” framework that we use to specify the prototype presented in section 4.
We finish with a brief discussion of the salient features of the prototype.
1
http://e-institutions.iiia.csic.es
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2. Background
In this paper we will talk mostly about mediation that is IT-supported to some extent
and focus on a subset of ODR that includes the type of agreement mechanisms
usually associated with mediation, namely, standard non-intrusive mediation,
arbitration and some forms of negotiation —mediated or not.
The motivation of our proposal lies in the on-going Catalan regional government
effort to produce the White Book on Mediation in Catalonia. 2 This White Book
includes a chapter on technology for mediation with a description of the state of the
art of IT technology in applied mediation and guidelines for appropriate uses of
technology in the Catalan mediation environment. As part of that reflection, we are
developing the prototype we report on in this paper.
A quick survey of active on-line mediation services shows interesting variations
from an IT perspective. There is a group of services that limit their IT content to the
use of conventional asynchronous communication to activate, acknowledge or keep
track of mediation landmark stages, or support documentation of the mediation
process. In any case, the IT uses in this group are so undifferentiated that aside from
the fact that there is a website to inform and in some cases to establish contacts with
parties in conflict one can hardly say they are IT supported mediations. A second
group uses IT to control the mediation flow process and make available on-line, to the
mediated parties, some sort of "agreement device" such as a bracketed text, a
structured complaint form or a synchronous meeting place or caucus possibilities
(chats, IP video conferencing). Finally there is a third group of mediation services
that rely on a fully automated system in which the process flow is IT mediated, party
interventions are IT mediated as well, and even in some cases, some agreement
devices are IT enabled (for instance, simple blind bid-crossing, anonymous “brain-
storming” records, iterated negotiation or even automatic last resource arbitration).
From a business-model point of view, services range from those with a very focalized
mediation domain to the quite generic; some service providers build their model
around a software platform while other use such platforms as a support for their core
business. None of the service providers reviewed seems to have truly sophisticated
ODR technologies like the ones reported in academic fora.
Technological maturity is rather uneven in the Catalonian government mediation
instances, and although some have functional mediation case-management and
archiving, and rather mature IT corporate environments, others provide mediating
services within considerably rudimentary IT conditions. The prototype we are
developing is intended, thus, to be flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of
sophistication levels and to, ideally, all mediation domains; and rich enough to
provide thorough support to most activities involved in the mediation process. We
claim electronic institutions are an appropriate technology to use for this purpose.
2
http://idt.uab.cat/llibreblanc/
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Towards a Platform for Online Mediation
3. An Electronic Institution approach to an on-line mediation
environment
Electronic institutions are computational artifacts that correspond to a given extent to
what traditional institutions are. They are, first of all, a collection of artificial
constraints imposed on the behavior of individuals, or agents, who participate in a
collective activity. They are also the entity that enforces those conventions and,
thirdly, they are software systems that facilitate interactions among those participating
agents. That is, they are a means to establish, enact and enforce “the rules of the
game”, so that that game may be played on-line. Because electronic institutions
embody prescriptive and governance features, and these may be applied to activities
involving software or human agents that may be independent, autonomous and self-
motivated, electronic institutions may be reified as a form of regulated open multi
agent systems.
Although these intuitions are more or less shared by different technical proposals
we will adhere to the specific electronic institutions framework developed in the IIIA
which we shall refer to as EI from now on. The EI framework includes a conceptual
model to describe an institution, a computational model that explains how an
institution is enacted and a pragmatic model that establishes how it is implemented.
For the purpose of this paper we will only be concerned with the conceptual model,
that we shall quickly describe here and note that the EI framework includes software
tools to specify and run arbitrary electronic institutions. 3 Those are the tools we use
for this prototype.
In the EI conceptual model we assume all interactions are among autonomous
agents and all interactions among agents within the EI are speech acts (that count as
actions in the world). We further assume that interactions are repetitive and thus may
be structured as one would organize the scenes of a play. We further assume that
agents may be humans or software agents who are able to use and react to the
institutional acts.
With these assumptions in mind, we may specify an electronic institution through
three components:
1. The dialogical framework that specifies the content and interpretation of the
admissible speech acts. It defines a set of roles agents may play in the institution,
the domain ontology involved in illocutions and the information model on which
institutional actions are based.
2. The performative structure that specifies how the interactions are organized within
the institution. It is formed by a network of scenes, (or conversations agents may
participate in), that are joined through transitions (that state how agents may
change scenes, or more precisely, the causal and temporal interdependencies
among scenes). Scenes are conversation protocols or dialogue games, which are
specified as directed graphs where arcs are labelled by speech acts schemata and
nodes thus institutional states.
3. The rules of behaviour that put constraints on the actions (illocutions) that
individuals who are playing a given role may take at some point in the enactment
3
The EIDE platform, available at http://e-intitutions.iiiia.csic.es.
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P. Noriega and C. López
of the institution. More prosaically, these rules are pre-conditions and post-
conditions associated with each arc, speech act, of a scene or a transition. More
formally, these rules establish the normative positions of commitments that arise
from agent interactions.
The EI framework includes a graphical specification language, ISLANDER, which
may be used to specify electronic institutions whose run-time versions may be
enacted by agents. Agents interact in the institution through a middleware layer,
AMELI, on top of JADE or similar agent communication platforms.
4. A prototype for a mediation institution
Using the EI framework we are defining a prototype institution that we believe may
be appropriate for customizing mediation support environments to the needs of the
different mediation instances of the Catalan initiative.
Figure 1 shows the complete performative structure of a mediation institution.
Boxes correspond to scenes. In this case the eight dark boxes correspond to mediation
activities --- a scene where the claimant chooses the type of negotiation she wants to
use, four different negotiation conventions, a scene for standard non-intrusive
mediation and two ensuing scenes for arbitration and recommendation. The two light
boxes are scenes that are needed in every electronic institution as a device to start and
terminate enactments. Lines connecting boxes (and widgets) indicate transitions.
These transition lines are labeled with the roles that may move from one scene to
another. In this institution there are only three roles: party (involved in a mediation),
staff (responsible for institutional functions like time-keeping, record handling, etc.)
and mediator and they all intervene in all the scenes.
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Fig. 1. Performative structure of a mediation institution
Scenes as the one in Fig. 2 are graphical depictions of interaction protocols. In this
case it shows a protocol for mediated negotiation. Circles correspond to states of the
negotiation and boxes indicate those states where certain roles may enter or exit the
scene. Arcs are labelled with illocutions. In this case the scene involves two parties
that exchange offers; however, parties do not talk to each other, they talk to the
mediator who after the intervention of one party may decide either to pass that
communication to the other party or request the original party for a modification of
the original communication. Parties may agree or defect and staff keeps track of time
so that if a “timeout” period has elapsed without acceptable offers and counteroffers
the scene is terminated.
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Fig. 2. Mediated negotiation protocol
Thus, for example, the top leftmost arc abbreviates the illocution where party one
communicates the mediator and offer, the next line (top, leaving estado_0) indicates
that the mediator communicates the standing offer to party 2. From that estado_1,
there are five possible actions, one in which party 2 communicates a counteroffer and
four that bring the scene to an end: that party 2 decides to abandon the mediation
process, that he decides to leave this negotiation scene but embark into another form
of mediation, that he agrees on the standing offer, or that the staff agent declares the
scene is over because a deadline ha been reached without agreement among the
parties.
Figure 3 shows the performative structure of another mediation institution, in this
case, one that is mirrored after the EcoDir model (http://www.ecodir.org). We have
the same three roles as before but a simpler structure of four non-trivial scenes.
Fig. 3. Performative structure of an EcoDir-like institution
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Towards a Platform for Online Mediation
Now let’s illustrate what happens when we have agents interacting in this
electronic institution by looking at the actual display of a run-time monitor. Figure 4
shows the protocol of the Negotiation scene and figure 5 a partial screen shot of those
interactions taking place in that scene.
Fig. 4. EcoDir negotiation scene
One may distinguish three main regions in Fig. 5. The one on the right corresponds
to the electronic institution as a whole, that is why it shows (on the far right) a list of
all the actions that are taking place since the start of the execution and (on its left) a
graph of the main actions in the performative structure; for instance that the latest
actions are happening in state estado_2 of the Negotiation scene.
The leftmost top region displays what the staff agent S sees and does and beneath
the same for agent P1. In both cases there is their private view of the performative
structure on the left and the messages each one hears and attempts to communicate to
the institution. What is worth noting is that these two agents are in fact humans that
use the rather primitive interface to test the specifications. There is, obviously, a
convenient interface for software agents.
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Fig. 5. Screenshot of the enactment of the EcoDir-like institution
5. Concluding remarks
What we have presented here is an exercise in the design of a mediation environment.
We have illustrated how to use the EI conceptual model and tools to describe the
main processes involved in mediation and specify the details of the conventions that
govern those processes. We have shown two examples of mediation models to give
an indication of the flexibility of this approach and how these ideas may result in
software programs that automate computer supported mediation. But aside from the
software engineering advantages, what are the salient features of this approach for
developing ODR environments?
The EI framework is well adapted to deal with interactions that are reducible to
compact, univocal, formal messages like those involved in economic transactions and
in that case it is a powerful way of implementing systems where software agents are
involved, sine these may be focussed to the decisional aspects of the mediation and
not to the interpretative or rhetorical ones. There are ODR applications where this
conciseness and the use of software agents are a plus.
Notwithstanding this last remark, the EI framework may also work with human
agents—as we intended to show with figure 5—and in that case, the need for terse
messages may be dismissed altogether. A richer semantics allows for simpler
interaction protocols but a richer performative structure may then come handy, for
one may conceive innovative ways of facilitating agreement that may be at hand for
mediators to use when appropriate. While the total automation may be unlikely and
probably unadvisable, having an automated due process that may be documented and
used on-line may be quite desirable and, as we tried to illustrate with the crude
mediation models, quite easy to accomplish with the EI framework.
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Acknowledgements
Research in this paper has received funding from the Departament de Justícia de la
Generalitat de Catalunya, UAB through Project Llibre Blanc de la Mediació a
Catalunya and from the Consolider Program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation through project AT (CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).
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