The Idea
Here are the main things Dioptra does:
- Helps people structure problems
- Helps teams work together
- Offers advice
- Helps with workflow
Dioptra helps people structure problems
To "structure a problem" means to break it down into a series of steps. This helps people organize their thinking. Dioptra offers some structure, but people must make their own choices about how to compare actions. Here is the overall structure of a Dioptra project:
Analysis is where most of the work is done. Here are the steps in analysis:
People decide on what the issues are. They can add principles (e.g., justice), virtues, divine commands, heuristics (e.g., the newspaper test), etc. They don't have to enter stakeholders, if they don't want to. This lets them use "pure" approaches (utilitarianism, duty, divine command, etc.), or mixed approaches (e.g., mainly utilitarianism, but with a heuristic added in).
Dioptra helps teams work together
Difficult decisions are often made by teams of people, not individuals working in isolation. Dioptra maintains a single shared view of every decision project. All decision makers see exactly the same information at all times. When one person makes a change, everyone sees the change immediately, no matter where they are in the world.
Dioptra also offers several tools to help people work together. Here is an instance of the brainstormer tool:
Notice that all suggestions are anonymous. Anonymity helps people be more open with ideas they aren't sure about.
People add as many tools as they want in the problem structure. If they want to talk about a particular stakeholder, they add a discussion tool to the stakeholder's toolstack. They have complete control.
Dioptra offers advice
Every Dioptra tool has a help button. It offers two kinds of assistance. First, there is the usual kind of help about how to use the tool, such as what each button does. Second, there are suggestions about how to use the tool in decision making. For example, suppose a user adds a discussion tool tool to the Elaboration section. The Elaboration section helps ensure decision makers fully understand the situation. Dioptra will suggest how a discussion tool can help in elaboration. For example, the tool could help decision makers discuss the motives of the various players in the situation.
Dioptra also has a resource tree. The tree has articles on ethics, decision making, group interaction, and other topics. It also has links to relevant Web sites.
Dioptra helps with workflow
"Workflow" is about how tasks are actually completed: who does them, what the steps are, what order they are done in, how they are tracked, how they are synchronized, etc. Wikipedia has a short introduction to workflow, and links to workflow Web sites.
Dioptra has features to help decision makers handle workflow. Each project has a discussion tool that is outside the scope of the decision to be made:
Decision makers can use the workflow discussion to allocate work, synchronize work, etc. For example, if someone wants to chat about a stakeholder, s/he can add a discussion tool to the stakeholder's toolstack, then post a message to the workflow discussion tool, inviting others to join the chat. Each client alerts its user when there is a new workflow message. Those users who choose to do so can join in the chat about the stakeholder.
When users connect to a Dioptra server and select a project, they are shown a list of changes to the project since they last logged on. This helps them keep up-to-date with other peoples' work.
Dioptra also offers workflow advice. It appears in both the usage advice for tools, and in the resource tree.
Recommended link:
- Usage scenarios (Samples of problem solving with Dioptra)
