Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes

What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb?
In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools.
This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University.
Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts.
They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications.
In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools.
This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University.
Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts.
They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications.
As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.
Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes
Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al. | January 2017
380 | 130 colour illustrations | 10" x 8" (254 x 203 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783743032
ISBN Hardback: 9781783743049
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783743056
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783743063
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783743070
ISBN Digital (XML): 9781783746170
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0108
Subject codes: BIC: JPA (Political science and theory), JFF (Social issues and processes), JPHV (Political structures: democracy), UBJ (Ethical and social aspects of IT); BISAC: COM079010 (Computers: Social Aspects; Human-Computer Interaction); OCLC Number: 1039060428.
Contributors
Prologue
Introduction
CONCEPTUALISATION
1. Interdisciplinarity and Mixed Methods
2. The Concept of Democracy
3. Art as a Creative and Critical Public Space
4. Plural Democracy
ELICITATION
5. Criteria Weight Elicitation – A Comparative Study
6. Cardinal and Rank Ordering of Criteria with Clouds
7. Attitude Ranking
8. Evaluating ICT and Development
9. A Mobile Urban Drama as a Model for Interactive Elicitation
CALCULATION
10. Multi-Criteria Decision Making
11. Comparing MCDA Methods
12. Algorithms for Decision Analysis
APPLICATIONS
13. A Model for Flood Risk Management: Bac Hung Hai
14. A Model for Flood Risk Management: Tisza
15. Roşia Montană Gold Exploitation
16. Decision Making in Urban Planning
17. Actory: Visualising Reputational Power to Promote Deliberation
18. Njaru: Developing Tools for Deliberation in Multiple Public Spheres
19. Evaluation of an Online Learning Environment
20. A Low Carbon Society by 2050 – The Stockholm-Mälar Region Case
Epilogue
Publications
© 2017 Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al., Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al., Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108
Further details about CC BY-NC-ND licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
All external links were active on 11/12/2016 unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
This book is a documentation of research funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, Strategic funds from the Swedish government within ICT – The Next Generation, and The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
PHOTOS Åsa Andersson Broms, Love Ekenberg, Anna Hesselgren, Björn Larsson and Rebecca Medici. Photographs not attributed to specified persons have been taken by Love Ekenberg.
COVER IMAGE Love Ekenberg
DESIGN Karin Hansson
ILLUSTRATIONS Gov2u