The development of GRASS (GRoup Report Authoring Support System) started in 1993. In that year, the government of the west coast Canadian province of British Columbia decided to allow clearcutting of the Clayoquot Sound watershed. The resulting intense protests finally led the government to commission a Scientific Panel to write a series of reports defining new land use policies. However, this expert authoring process was intransparent. The idea was then conceived to create the GRASS system as "an arena for credible societal discourse". The aim of the system is to support the collaborative authoring of concise group reports that give their readers an up-to-date and credible overview of the positions of a wide range of stakeholders on a particular issue. In those days, Web technology was still in its infancy and the specifications of GRASS were hard to implement. In 2004, Jaap Wagenvoort and I developed a working demonstrator. It was thoroughly tested by a group of students, who produced a complete group report on a parliamentary research information system for public infrastructure investments. Since then, my R&D priorities were elsewhere. However, we have recently started development of GRASS 2.0

Key publications

• A. de Moor and H. Weigand (2006). Effective Communication in Virtual Adversarial Collaborative Communities. Journal of Community Informatics, 32(2):223-247.
• A. de Moor and M. Aakhus (2006). Argumentation Support: From Technologies to Tools. Communications of the ACM, 49(3):93-98./li>
• A. de Moor (2004). Strengthening Civil Society by Developing Stakeholder Communities Using Intermedia. In Proc. of the Building & Bridging Community Networks: Knowledge, Innovation & Diversity through Communication Conference, Brighton, March 31-April 2, 2004.
• M. Heng and A. de Moor (2003). From Habermas's Communicative Theory to Practice on the Internet. Information Systems Journal, 13(4):331-352.

Last updated: July 12, 2010