Spontaneous decision conferencing in parliamentary negotiations

Political decision making and negotiations offer promising settings for the use of group decision support systems (GDSS) and negotiation support systems (NSS). So far, there has been insufficient understanding of the needs of this important area. This paper introduces a new method, called spontaneous decision conferencing (SDC). Two groups of three Finnish Members of Parliament (MP) had SDC sessions to discuss the membership of Finland in the European Union (EU) and two other topics. We wanted to find out how well the proposed technique could adapt to the needs of the politicians. Our experiences emphasize the importance of having a clear method for problem structuring and they encourage further studies on portable negotiation support techniques