865 T ThinkClick: A Case Study of a Large Group Decision Support System (LGDSS) Hanan Yaniv University of Calgary, Canada Susan Crichton University of Calgary, Canada Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. IntroductIon Getting a large audience to actively participate in a lecture is a challenge faced by many lecturers. The value of active participation is well supported in cur- rent research with signifcant contribution made by the introduction of electronic response systems (ERS). ERS allows each member of the audience to participate by using a hand-held device (like a TV remote control), responding to (usually) multiple-choice questions presented on a board. This article is introducing a new approach to the use of ERS, making the audience engage in a deci- sion-making process based on multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT), a commonly used theory in decision making, aiming to: • Help conference participants, in a large group setting, prioritize suggestions and action items developed over the previous days of a conference, drawing on discussions held in concurrent, small group break out sessions. • Organize those suggestions/items into a priori- tized list that refects the discussions and honors individual participant voice. • Generate a list, based on the group organization process that will direct future innovation for conference participants and organizers. • Present the collective knowledge from the confer- ence in a way that participants can see themselves as contributing partners in the conference outcome statements. This article, then, describes a case study of decision making in a large audience, keeping each participant in- volved in a meaningful process of an elaborated analysis of action items. The technology, the process, and the experiment are presented as a study of the feasibility of using such systems in large audiences. We introduce here the term large group decision support system (LGDSS) to describe the process of using technology to assist a large audience in making decisions. Background Invited to “harvest” the knowledge in an international development conference, we identifed the last agenda item, prioritizing a list of 20 action items proposed by the conference participants in four different theme groups, during group sessions, throughout the conference, to be of particular concern. The issue of honoring participant voice was of specifc concern for us as we knew that concerns about language, gender, self-effcacy, age, experience, and cultural differences might privilege some participant voices over others. Prioritizing a list of action items is a decision-mak- ing process. A democratic election process is usually a matter of prioritizing a list of leaders or parties, based on a majority vote. The simplest approach to prioritiz- ing a list of action items would have been, then, voting for each of the proposed items and arranging the items based on the number of votes each item received. The limitation of such an approach is in its superfciality. Items will be voted upon without deep consideration of the item’s attributes, especially since the action items were initially proposed in separate interest groups without discussing them at the assembly. Searching for the most suitable solution, we had chosen to use a MAUT-based methodology (explained later), as MAUT provide a method for analyzing alterna-