Online Discussion Support System with Facilitation Function

In this paper, we present a discussion board system (DBS) with a facilitator function that we developed for the purpose of facilitating discussions that require decision-making that incorporates diverse values and opinions. Its function is to constantly extract nouns from the utterances of discussion participants and display them on the DBS on each participant's personal computer. Items to be decided in the discussion are displayed together with a frame (called a “box”), and each participant puts the displayed keywords in the box according to their own opinions and intentions. No other participant can see what the individual is doing. The color of any keyword that all participants put in the same box changes to green. Furthermore, comments are automatically presented based on the time when each participant last spoke and the time when the keyword was moved. This is intended to encourage participants who appear to be less involved to join the discussion. Experiments with the DBS suggested that it might be possible to capture the will of participants who disagree but do not speak. However, it was also deemed necessary to post comments that encourage participants to express their intentions independently, and to have a mechanism that can link the motivated manifestation of intentions to appropriate actions.