Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
The problem
Currently, debates allow participants to post comments/arguments in favour or against a proposal, and they can also express if they agree or disagree with the arguments issued by others. However, this information is not aggregated, and thus, it can be difficult to asses the debate results (that is, if the proposal should be accepted or rejected).
The solution
It would be really useful to aggregate all the opinions issued in a debate so that the result becomes apparent. The attached images illustrate this idea (thumbs up/down are just to illustrate the idea, proper design would be required).
This aggregated opinion would help to increase the quality of the debate (an thus, of the democratic process it represents), and may incentivise participants to pose their opinions.
Considered alternatives
The Barcelona City Council has funded several research projects for applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to solve this problem. Along these projects, several aggregation methods have been proposed but not yet added as functionalities to Decidim. These methods go beyond the simple idea of considering the proportion of comments in favour or comments against the proposal because, as shown in the attached images, some arguments may be stronger than others (that is, more people agree with them).
Additional context
These projects have provided the code for the aggregation computation as open source, but it needs to be translated to Rubi for it to be incorporated in Decidim.
We are researchers from the University of Barcelona and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), and are in touch with Platoniq to see how this new functionality could be incorporated into Decidim.
Does this issue could impact on users private data?
No, participants’ opinions are publicly shared.
Funded by
It could be partially funded through Fundació Solidaritat UB.
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Conversation with Ariadna Vila
Hi @maite_lopez_sanchez We've been working on something very similar. We called it Top Comments: https://github.com/gencat/participa/tree/master/decidim-top_comments
Here you can see, more or less, how it works: https://participa.gencat.cat/assemblies/jopregunto/f/2849/debates/38#comments-for-Debate-38
There is a counter of comments in favor and against, and it also appears the most voted comment
Good to know @Ariadna_VA that there are some initiatives in this line! However, I would like to point out some differences I see from looking at the example you provide.
The counter of comments in favour and against is indeed helpful because provides some information at first glance. And it is also useful to count the “votes” of comments (I guess it counts the number of green ^ and adds them to the number of red v). However, it is worth noticing that comments are differently valued, for instance, in the example you provide the comment by Carmen (https://participa.gencat.cat/assemblies/jopregunto/f/2849/debates/38?commentId=48298#comment48298) has 8 greens and 5 reds, and is shown as the most voted (as it adds 13 “votes”). However, there is another comment by Laia (https://participa.gencat.cat/assemblies/jopregunto/f/2849/debates/38?commentId=48342#comment48342) that has 6 greens and 0 reds, and one may argue that this comment has more “net” support than the previous one (thus, some comments may be more consensual than others despite having less total “votes”). Our proposal considers these and other issues, so that the overall aggregated value incorporates this kind of subtle information.
(By the way, most of the comments in the example are neutral, and, although in this particular example this may not be relevant, shows that having neutral as the default option biases a lot the final amount of comments in favour and against, but this is a design issue that is not related to your comment).
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