Assessing the viability of virtual structured democratic dialogue

The paper examines the impact of virtual rendering of the Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) process. The authors discuss the implications of implementing each process stage virtually and suggest necessary adaptations to the relevant practices. They provide recommendations for improving the overall quality of online sessions and propose qualitative and quantitative indicators that can be used to compare and evaluate face-to-face and hybrid or virtual implementations. Pertinent indicators include financial cost, completion time, cost of required resources, number of factors generated, Spreadthink, extent, depth and quality of discussions during clustering and mapping stages, number of dimensions identified, number of factors included in the influence map, number of connections in the influence tree, situational complexity indices and degree of agreement on how to move forward. The authors propose that further research and additional case studies can help systems scientists and practitioners converge on reliable and validated criteria and metrics to allow solid assessment of possible quality loss associated with rendering each stage of the SDD process virtual.