Interesting term I came across today: hybrid forum, via a tweet by Fabien Gandon.
“Hybrid forums”, according to Michel Callon and colleagues are:
forums because they are open spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous, including experts, politicians, technicians, and laypersons who consider themselves involved. They are also hybrid because the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety of domains, from ethics to economic and including physiology, nuclear physics, and electromagnetism.
– Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, from a chapter called “Hybrid Forums”, Chapter 1 in Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy by Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. translated by Graham Burchell, MIT Press 2009, First published by Editions du Seuil in France as Agir dans un monde incertain: Essai sur la democratie technique.
In their heterogeneity, there is a relation to the “wicked problem” ((a starting motivation for much work in human argumentation))- where “Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.” ((Wikipedia, Wicked Problem, Background and context section )).
In their openness and heterogeneity, there is also a relation to the open (peer) production community (around which I am currently framing my dissertation work).