PARMENIDES:Facilitating Deliberation in Democracies.

Governments and other groups interested in the views of citizens require the means to present justifications of proposed actions,and the means to solicit public opinion concerning these justifications.Although Internet technologies provide the means for such dialogues ,system designers usually face a choice between allowing unstructured dialogues,through,for example,bulletin boards,or requiring citizens to acquire a knowledge of some argumentation schema or theory,as in,for example,ZENO.Both of these options present usuability problems.In this paper,we describe an implemented system called PARMENIDES which allows structured argument over a proposed course of action,without requiring knowledge of the underlying argumentation theory.