Procid: Bridging Consensus Building Theory with the Practice of Distributed Design Discussions

Consensus is a desired but elusive goal in many distributed discussions. A critical problem is that discussion platforms lack mechanisms for realizing consensus strategies and realizing these strategies without tool support can be hard. This paper introduces Procid, a novel browser plugin that provides interaction and visualization features for bringing consensus strategies to distributed design discussions. Key features include the ability to organize discussions around ideas, to register and visualize support for or against ideas, and to define criteria for evaluating ideas. It also applies interaction constraints fostering best practices of consensus building. Procid extends the discussion platform of one open source software community. Two evaluations were conducted. The first collected perceptions of the tool from members of the community for their own discussions. The second compared how Procid affects a distributed design discussion relative to the current discussion platform in the community. Results of both studies showed that users found the features of our tool beneficial and perceived it as more effective for consensus building than the existing platform.