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Reconstructing civil society with intermedia communities

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Abstract

A healthy civil society is essential in order to deal with “wicked” societal problems. Merely involving institutional actors and mass media is not sufficient. Intermedia can play a crucial complementary role in strengthening civil society. However, the potential of these technologies needs to be carefully tailored to the requirements and constraints of the communities grown around them. The GRASS system for group report authoring is one carefully tailored socio-technical system aimed at unlocking this potential. Such systems may help to develop stakeholder communities that are more productive in societal conflict resolution.

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Notes

  1. http://www.knet.ca/.

  2. A more in-depth treatment of these norms is given in (de Moor and Weigand 2006).

  3. http://grass-arena.net.

  4. The full report can be seen at http://grass-arena.net/report-overview.php?reportid=7.

  5. In the meantime, wikis have become quite popular for collaborative authoring. Although they have great potential, most wikis are currently still lacking a structured approach to coordinating the complex, interdependent workflows needed to produce high-quality documents that need to satisfy a range of specific checks and balances. It would therefore be interesting to see to what extent the GRASS design principles could be reimplemented in a wiki.

  6. A detailed account of the co-evolution process of practices and tools leading to GRASS is given in (de Moor and Aakhus 2006).

  7. Karla Point, personal communication.

  8. For example: issue-based discussion systems like gIBIS, QuestMap, Compendium (http://www.compendiuminstitute.org/); document production and annotation systems like the D3E digital document discourse environment (http://d3e.sourceforge.net/) and FreeText (http://www.drostan.org/projects/fafo/); configurable discourse facilitation environments such as Unchat (http://www.unchat.com/) and Dito (http://zeno8.ais.fraunhofer.de/zeno/), and Web 2.0 style argumentation support systems like Cohere (http://cohere.open.ac.uk/) and DebateGraph (http://debategraph.org/).

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Jaap Wagenvoort, for his continuous dedication and the quality of his GRASS implementation.

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  1. CommunitySense, Cavaleriestraat 2, 5017 ET, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Aldo de Moor

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  1. Aldo de Moor
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Correspondence to Aldo de Moor.

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de Moor, A. Reconstructing civil society with intermedia communities. AI & Soc 25, 279–289 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-009-0262-x

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