The present Technical Report contains a concise analysis of some participatory methods and a discussion of the method of consensus as a formal tool for decisionmaking. The treatment is kept at an informal and colloquial level with the aim to be precise and concise. The main source is Elliot et al. (2005) but other sources are used and will be mentioned in the right places. This Technical Report...

When very large groups have to brainstorm in smaller subgroups, meeting organizers have a choice between two options: (1) Let every subgroup start from scratch, or (2) Let every next subgroup build on the results from the previous subgroup. We refer to these options as the Decathlon and Relay modes of brainstorming respectively. During a case study we investigated which brainstorming mode would...

Current decision-making practices used to determine water allocations between competing uses in Australia generally disregard the social, cultural and political impacts of these types of decisions and to a lesser extent the economics. Tokenistic community consultation, rather than meaningful and purposeful participation in the water allocation decision-making process, results in a lack of commu...

Our research explores meta-design as an innovative framework in the design of an emerging type of software-intensive systems called participative software systems. The fundamental challenge facing this approach is achieving the best fit between the software system and its ever-changing context of use, problems, domains, users, and communities of users. Our objective is to define the scientific ...

This research investigates the relationship between the hierarchical level of managerial personnel and individual differences in their leadership styles, specifically the degree to which they are disposed to the use of participative versus autocratic decision-making strategies. Analysis of self-report data collected from four different levels of managers suggests a greater propensity for use of...

The presented work investigates process models for participatory spatial decision processes, especially focusing on IT-supported procedures. Results of this work are process patterns according to different classes of problem complexity, accompanied by operational instructions for conducting the procedure, and requirements for the supporting software tools. The aim of this paper is to explain th...

In a distributed eLearning environment, the development of learning objects is a participative task. We consider learning objects as knowledge pieces, which are subject to the management processes of acquisition, delivery, creation and production. A multiple-tier architecture for participative knowledge production tasks is introduced, where knowledge-producing agents are arranged into knowledge...

Participative software systems are a new class of software systems whose development does not end at the deployment but requires continued user participation and contribution. They need to provide both solutions to users and a participation framework that entails technical and social challenges. Metadesign is a promising approach to guide the development of participative software systems. Drawi...

Introduction: This study aimed to investigate the male and female students’ learning styles of classroom participation and these styles’ differences between Humanities and Science majors.Methods: 1039 individuals were selected through the proportional stratifiedrandom sampling method among undergraduate and graduate students inHumanities (n=421) and Science (n=618) faculties of Tehran Universit...