“…No doubt, like most other areas of Information Systems, a variety of names will be attributed to it in coming years. This topic draws its foundation form a number of related areas: Group Decision Support Systems [9,23], Nominal Group Techniques [24], The Delphi Method [17,22], Computer Mediated Communication Systems [14], Scaling Theory [20], Social Judgment Theory and Decision Theory [2,12] and on-line communities [13,16,18]. However, we hypothesize that the design of systems to support societal collaborative processes for knowledge gathering and formulation of alternative viewpoints introduces some new and challenging criteria and requirements for successful operation.…”