A case for the re-use of community reasoning

In software engineering, the re-use concept is a design principle that improves efficiency, quality and maintainability by ensuring that software artifacts are developed once and re-used many times. In an analogous way, a group's reasoning can be imagined to be re-used by that or another group to enhance efficiency, transparency and consistency in decision-making. However, the re-use of reasoning is difficult to achieve because group reasoning cannot easily be captured and the way in which a group reasoning artifact is subsequently used is not obvious. This chapter explores the case for the re-use of community reasoning and concludes that individuals can benefit from a representation of a previous group's coalesced reasoning if the reasoning to be modeled and the scheme to represent the reasoning have been selected to suit the task. The authors contend that specifying the future community likely to re-use the reasoning, called the intended audience, informs a decision regarding whether an exercise aimed at coalescing a group's reasoning is best performed verbally, in writing or with the use of more structured schemes such as Argument visualization. © 2011, IGI Global.