Empowering the Delphi decision-making process using expert search from social networks

Delphi is a traditional method for supporting the decision-making process. It relies on a panel of experts who collaboratively reach a consensus about a given topic. This method may be empowered with new communication technologies which can gather a larger and more geographically distant expert group. In this work, we discuss in depth the gathering of a panel of experts for Delphi, which may be constrained by geographic location and competence levels, using methods to find experts in social networks. The Delphi process was also adapted to use social network analysis methods to find experts, thus allowing faster expert selection from small local groups to huge worldwide groups.