Collaboration engineering, philosophy, and Democracy with LaSca

Now-a-days, with the wide availability of Internet access, a great diffusion of the decision-making in large groups concepts and practices is happening, with many softwares to support it and many people eager to participate and actually collaborating arising. However, these ideas are not exactly new. In the middle of the 5th-4th century BC, some Greek city-states, like Athens, already had a political system in which the citizens of these states made the governmental decisions. And, besides being the birthplace of Democracy, Greece, with its high-developed philosophy ideas, also laid the foundations to Argumentation Theory, which will help in analyzing and validating the today´s concepts of decision-making in large groups used in the LaSca (from Large Scale) Decision Support System. This paper, after presenting this discussion, and also illustrating some concepts of Collaboration Engineering with the developed system, will give an example of how LaSca could be extremely useful in an actual electoral system.