Dialectical Discourse Management through Online Collaboration

This chapter presents experiences of time-limited networked forums created for the purposes of sharing views and insights on specific development topics (through fixed-length, Internet-based conferences), gathering wider feedback and broadening participation. It illustrates the effectiveness, represented by global outreach and frequency of interactions, of the communication medium in stimulating an online dialectic dialogue involving multiple stakeholders. The experience described represents an example of time and scope-based online interactions in a distributed community. This distributed virtual network is organized and temporarily brought together for ad hoc and timebound knowledge exchange. The chapter summarizes experiences that can be replicated to solicit knowledge creation and sharing across multiple domains.