A Proposal of Iterative Consensus Process for Group Decision Making

Consensus is so important that it has always occupied its crucial position in human society. In particular, the meaning and importance of consensus in democratic society is much more special because it is a social system that operates based on the consensus among people. Up to now, human society has reached consensus by using the majority vote, but it is clear that there are several problems in it. Meanwhile, there are lots of researches which have been carried out so far to develop the appropriate methodology and tools for reaching out consensus. However, these researches suggest that measurement to derive the result is difficult for general purpose in that the evaluation is one-time, and that the trust problem arises from delegating the consensus process to the 3-rd party such as information system is not solved. In this paper, we propose an iterative consensus process which can solve the problems above, and general description about this process is included. The proposed process draws consensus in an iterative way, visualize the information generated from iteration, presents it to the participants, and supports the participants’ consensus through structured discussion. In addition, the trust problem, which occurs when a consensus process is delegated to the information system can be solved with utilizing the blockchain technology by conveying and ensuring the reliability of the result, and this proposed process can adopt it.