Implementation of Web-based Consensus Support System for Campus Greening Project: Preliminary Results

In this paper, we present an implementation of a web-based consensus support system for the campus greening project at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. Recently, WWW technology has enabled us to share information and gather opinions on the Internet. However, on such systems, it is difficult to get a consensus because there is less focus on converging discussions and arguments. Thus, there is a lot of need to support gathering and converging of opinions to facilitate forming a consensus on the WWW. On the other hand, in the field of civil engineering, e.g., city planning and public enterprises, a lot of workshops have been held to gather opinions not only from experts but from civilians as well. The problem with such workshops is that there are concrete limitations with time, space, and cost. Thus, in this paper, we propose using a web-based system that can overcome such limitations as an alternative methodology to workshops. In this paper, we focus on support for the Campus Greening Project at the Nagoya Institute of Technology, where students and teachers are collaboratively planning to place high-tech grass panels on the campus. The system supports them in forming a consensus on where to put the grass panels. Concretely, in this system we utilize Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies and Google Maps API so that the participants can intuitively operate the system. Here the system can effectively support creating and evaluating alternatives, and voting on the final agreement. This system enables us to clarify the evaluations of the participants and show the final agreement while considering the entire cost. Our experimentation demonstrates that our system can effectively support forming a consensus and has sufficient usability.