Scalable Online Discussions as Listening Technology

This paper presents a novel online discussion environment that efficiently supports listening processes inspired by more collaborative management practices. This participative management approach requires feedback from stakeholders and people closer to the business reality and it is gathered by means of a scalable online meeting where any numbers of people discuss in realtime a given business topic. Participants put forward their opinions within their local group, and those opinions that receive high support locally propagate through the rest of the invited population as they accumulate more and more support. The output of these meetings is the set of individual opinions that have captured the greatest group support. The mechanisms enabling this type of discussions are presented and its benefits discussed. In addition, it is shown, using a simplified dynamic model of the participant interaction, that information overload is avoided even for large groups. The predictions of the model are compared to results from actual discussions that used the system.