Widescope - A social platform for serious conversations on the Web

There are several web platforms that people use to interact and exchange ideas, such as social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+; Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers; and myriad independent fora. However, there is a scarcity of platforms that facilitate discussion of complex subjects where people with divergent views can easily rationalize their points of view using a shared knowledge base, and leverage it towards shared objectives, e.g. to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise. In this paper, as a first step, we present Widescope, a novel collaborative web platform for catalyzing shared understanding of the US Federal and State budget debates in order to help users reach data-driven consensus about the complex issues involved. It aggregates disparate sources of financial data from different budgets (i.e. from past, present, and proposed) and presents a unified interface using interactive visualizations. It leverages distributed collaboration to encourage exploration of ideas and debate. Users can propose budgets ab-initio, support existing proposals, compare between different budgets, and collaborate with others in real time. We hypothesize that such a platform can be useful in bringing people's thoughts and opinions closer. Toward this, we present preliminary evidence from a simple pilot experiment, using triadic voting (which we also formally analyze to show that is better than hot-or-not voting), that 5 out of 6 groups of users with divergent views (conservatives vs liberals) come to a consensus while aiming to halve the deficit using Widescope. We believe that tools like Widescope could have a positive impact on other complex, data-driven social issues.