Software
PICOLA (Delibera 2.0)
Screen Shots
General Aims
While Delibera 1.0 was in development, Professor Cavalier was interested in exploring the potential creation of a somewhat similar environment using existing tools in a manner that would support a particular form of structured conversation different from the VAP experimental protocol. In particular, he was intrigued by the work of Stanford Professor James Fishkin in designing and implementing what Fishkin calls a Deliberative Poll®. With resources made available through the Multi-Media Lab of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics, Professor Cavalier, aided by a team of graduate students, put together a web application, using mostly HTML pages wrapped around Delibera’s synchronous roundtable feature, that could support the on-line version of a Deliberative Poll®. Indeed, it was so used in the Pittsburgh segment of a January, 2004 national Deliberative Poll® on U.S. foreign policy. Professor Shane dubbed the computer-mediated environment created by Professor Cavalier’s group a “Public Informed Citizens On-Line Assembly,” or PICOLA.
Features - Delibera Becomes PICOLA/Delibera 2.0
After the conclusion of the VAP experiments, Stuart Easterling, the technical lead in developing Delibera, took over the re-engineering of PICOLA. From that point forward, Mr. Easterling was supported by the Multi-Media Lab, and no longer by NSF funding. The Department of Philosophy (home to the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy and its Multimedia Lab), Computer Science, the Dean’s Office of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the University’s Office of Technology in Education contributed over $45,000 of direct support and over $30,000 in indirect support to this effort. Five graduate students in Human-Computer Interaction (Greg Vassallo, Jessica Smith, Alex Darrow, Peter Jones, and Sam Zeiss) spent a semester investigating and testing the user interface for PICOLA. Later, Sam Zaiss, joined by design graduate student Miso Kim joined Mr. Easterling in refining and enhancing PICOLA.
Development of PICOLA during 2005 and 2006 essentially merged the back-end of Delibera with the Flash front end of PICOLA. Though maintaining the general feature set of an online deliberative poll (library for information, asynchronous and synchronous forums for conversation, a section for an “expert panel,” and a survey tool), it can be used generically to support any structured, online conversation. As such, the current version of PICOLA (Delibera/PICOLA) represents a finished “product” of the NSF grant and is available for open source distribution. PICOLA 1.0 is truly Delibera 2.0.
The differences between the programs are as follows:
- Both Delibera and PICOLA make use of pre-registration, where the user’s basic information is entered into the system by an administrator, and both programs provide secure login. But PICOLA’s registration module is streamlined, with a single screen for photo capture (in order to generate “picons” of the user).
In both applications the user navigates using a series of tabs at the top of the screen. PICOLA also adds a Home screen, called MyPICOLA. This screen lists announcements (displayed after login in Delibera), as well as lists of Forum topics that have changed since the user’s last visit and any library items the user has commented on. The user may click on these items and jump to the particular topic or library item.- The Library features in Delibera and PICOLA are nearly identical, excluding user interface differences. PICOLA does not at the moment include stars for rating Library content, allowing only for comments. PICOLA also does not make use of a Clipboard.
- The asynchronous discussion in Delibera and PICOLA are essentially identical, excluding user interface differences. The synchronous conference in PICOLA and Delibera are very similar, excluding user interface differences. PICOLA makes use of a global text chat, as opposed to the whisper feature in Delibera. PICOLA includes a video-based moderator within the discussion.
- PICOLA also includes a simple text-based whiteboard that is controlled by the moderator, but does not include a Clipboard or a References pane for sharing Clipboard content. It contains an Expert Panel section that can handle real-time video streams of a panel discussion and can also serve as a separate asynchronous discussion forum among experts.
- PICOLA offers a basic administrator-customizable survey system for polling participants and storing their responses, developed specifically for PICOLA by Sam Zeiss.
- PICOLA has a much stronger and more accessible administrative interface than Delibera. Setting up discussion groups is more straightforward.
Performance
As PICOLA developed, improvements were made to the robustness and reliability of the program as a whole. Still, PICOLA is recommended chiefly for high-bandwidth internet connections of DSL or better. More and more homes have access to broadband and cities are beginning to provide free Wi-fi to their citizens. Universities and public libraries are also natural nodes for PICOLA installation.
In April, 2006 the first public use of PICOLA was incorporated into a Carnegie Mellon Deliberative Poll (called a “Campus Conversation”) on the topic of a “Student Bill of Rights.” On Wednesday, April 11, 2006, 28 students and faculty gathered for moderated, face-to-face discussions on whether Carnegie Mellon should keep its current policy regarding student rights or adopt the more far ranging proposal developed by David Horowitz. Participants were then given the opportunity to extend the discussion for five more days by logging onto PICOLA (for both asynchronous and scheduled synchronous conversations). Alhough there was a drop-off in numbers, more than ten students did use all of the features made available for this beta test. The system worked flawlessly. During June and into July, PICOLA was also tested extensively by a group from Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Skills Workshop. Again, the system worked well, but standard Cluster Management security concerns prevented the full campus implementation of PICOLA due to issues with the recent version of Flash-Plug-ins and the lack of time to address those issues for the Fall semester. We plan to use PICOLA in November, 2006 as part of a campus deliberative poll on “Public Art on Campus.” Individual, office, dorm and library computers will be able to run the program.