Title: Maturity in decision-making: a method to measure e-participation systems in virtual communities

Authors: Cristiano Maciel; Licinio Roque; Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia

Addresses: Instituto de Computação, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Rua Fernando Correa, 2367 Cuiabá, MT, Brazil ' Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Coimbra, Polo II – Pinhal de Marrocos, Coimbra, Portugal ' Departamento de Informática, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Av. Pasteur, 296 – Urca – Cep 22290-240, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract: The participation of citizens in the decision-making of a community is the essence of a democracy. As the number of citizens grew, direct participation became utopia and delegated to elected representatives. The spread of internet allied to the population pressure for transparency in government's decisions brought mass participation back to the table. The communication channels are there, though citizens' participations have not been effective frequently because their suggestions are not mature. This paper presents a method, maturity in decision-making (MDM), for measuring the maturity of a group for a decision considering the risk of group-thinking, shallow analysis or even polarisation. We have applied the method in two scenarios with promising results.

Keywords: web-based interaction; web measurements; social networks; e-government; decision-making; virtual community.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2018.096257

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2018 Vol.14 No.4, pp.395 - 416

Received: 12 Oct 2017
Accepted: 30 May 2018
Published online: 19 Nov 2018 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article