Negotiation Strategies Based on Decision Conferencing

Abstract

Our current democratic institutions stem from times in which transportation and communications were difficult and time consuming. With the time, politics have evolved little and politicians have developed a style in which, except at political campaigns, they have little feedback from citizens. Most ideas so far relating Internet and politics are directed toward facilitating traditional political methods through new technologies. Our feeling is that there are ways to transform, rather than facilitate. This transformation is possible because when the way in which the citizens interact with their representatives is modified, and this transformation makes possible that citizens play an active role, they could make decisions of major quality and more agreed by consensus, which is not possible with the mere automatic use of the new technologies, since it is not the same thing to allow that a citizen could vote from his or her house, facilitating the use of the traditional political methods, that in addition to be able to guide to this one in the different phases of the decision making, doing that his or her judgments and preferences are taken in account by the system. We propose migrating to Internet methodology of decision conferencing to support group-decision conferences through our architecture, QUIXOTE, born of Toward Electronic Democracy (TED) project of the European Science Foundation (ESF). Thanks to our architecture we distribute rationality to better resolve political decision making, helping groups through the Web facilitating them the use of decision and negotiation analysis methods.