From mobilization to consensus: innovating cross-media services to organize crowds into collaborative communities

The purpose of the current paper is to contribute to the field of e-participation by presenting a design concept for mediating technology that incorporates current information technology such as social and collaborative media designed for the purposes of civic engagement in society. Such technology could empower people to mobilize and engage themselves in proactive consensus-seeking and co-creation. Social media are broadly adopted in the reactive mobilization of citizen-initiated participatory activity in society such as protests like the London riots and the Occupy movements. In our view, there is a demand to organize mobilized crowds to collaborate in a consensus-seeking manner. For instance, there does not yet exist online applications that specifically serve the purposes of massive simultaneous co-editing of documents by citizens seeking consensus in societal issues. However, as we argue, there is no reason for such not to be integrated from existing technological components that are commonly accessible.