Argument-Based Policy Consultation Through Crowd Sourcing

This paper describes an on-going project investigating the use of crowdsourcing in policy consultation. We see this as particularly useful in the early consultation stages (e.g. White Paper) when the opinions of the public are sought to determine policy objectives. The project involves a number of discrete stages: thus far we have looked especially at question design, the generation of suitable test data and the suitability of various aggregation algorithms. On the basis of these results we can design software to collect opinions, and generate arguments. The test data will allow the arguments to be evaluated with respect to variously composed populations.