Discolab: Collaborative Discussions

The Discolab platform offers a service for collaborative readings and discussions that helps generate solutions to complex problems. By placing users at the center, Discolab aims to increase people's knowledge through their interactions with others, machines, and various methods of processing information. This idea emerged as a continuation of postdoctoral research on engagement and information diffusion in online content conducted by academic Cristian Candia-Castro Vallejos, Ph.D., at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Discolab enables people to interact on both public and private content. Users can create annotations linked to each paragraph of the content in question. Other users can vote on these annotations, and an algorithm orders them, prioritizing new and highly consensus annotations. By doing so, Discolab makes it easy for teams and organizations to find consensus and crystallize the knowledge and information that every member holds, making it accessible to others in an auditable and user-friendly manner.

Users can vote for or against the content being discussed and the annotations made by other users. Discolab then displays rankings for the content, the comments, and the users based on the votes. This feature helps identify the contents or processes that generate more consensus, as well as more controversy, in teams and organizations, allowing them to prioritize potential issues.

Currently, Discolab allows users to interact for free on the actual texts of the political constitutions of both the current and proposed Republic of Chile. Users can interact on the paragraphs of each constitutional text by voting at the article level and leaving comments. Rankings are then displayed to identify the articles that generate more consensus or division and the comments that help the community understand the legal text. Discolab also identifies the most controversial and polarized users.