Development and Trial Application of Prototype Program for "Social-MRC": Social Consensus Formation Support System Concerning IT Risk Countermeasures

The problem of multiple risks is that a countermeasure taken to reduce one risk can increase other risks. To address this problem, a system to support social consensus formation is needed to mitigate the risks. When the number of people necessary for consensus formation is low, such as within an organization, the "Multiple Risk Communicator" (MRC) developed previously by the authors offers a possible solution to this problem. However, the MRC cannot be applied to problems in which the number of stakeholders exceeds several thousand, and so an innovative solution was necessary. Accordingly, the authors modified and expanded the MRC and developed the concept of "Social-MRC" to comprehensively support risk communication on two levels: communication among opinion leaders and communication with the participation of ordinary stakeholders. We created a prototype program for Social-MRC and ran a trial application on the information filtering issue for children. In this paper, we describe the refined concept of Social-MRC and evaluate the results of the trial application.