Building Consensus in On-line Distributed decision Making: interaction, aggregation and the construction of shared knowlegde

In this chapter I discuss the possibility of exploiting large-scale knowl- edge sharing and mass interaction taking place on the Internet to build decision support systems based on distributed collective intelligence. Pros and cons of currently available collaborative technologies are reviewed with respect to their ability to favor knowledge accumulation, filtering, aggregation and consensus formation. In particular, I focus on a special kind of collaborative technologies, online collaborative mapping, whose characteristics can overcome some limita- tions of more popular collaborative tools, in particular thanks to their capacity to support collective sense-making and the construction of shared knowledge objects. By reviewing some of the work in the field, I argue that the combination of online mapping and computational techniques for beliefs aggregation can provide an in- teresting basis to support the construction of systems for distributed decision- making.