bcause is an ambitious research project funded by the Office of Naval Research of the US which aims at devising the next generation of technological solutions for discussion-enhanced collective intelligence and online deliberation.

Deliberation is the careful discussion before decision, and it can be defined as the thorough dialogical assessment of the reasons for and against a measure before a decision is made. When teams are geographically distributed, decision-making is made more difficult by the fact that these thorough conversations cannot happen face-to-face, with people sitting in the same room. Deliberation is therefore carried out online, with social media and online discussion technologies, that are generally limited in features, are not designed to support decision making, and often produce polarisation, division and conflict.

The bcause.app proposed solution

To transcend these limitations, the bcause project has developed a powerful new tool (bcause.app) for enabling accessible, structured and decentralized deliberation, and then evaluate it in a series of controlled and practical experiments.

To know more about the BCAUSE project please visit: https://bcause.kmi.open.ac.uk/