Web-hosted opportunities for cost-effective expert judgement studies

Expert judgement studies are a relatively new way of quantifying technical uncertainty in engineering design. Unfortunately they can be time-consuming and costly because they require physical meetings between a group of possibly widely dispersed experts. This paper investigates how web-hosted collaboration or ‘virtual teaming’ can be used to carry out such studies. It shows in particular how the functionality of commercially available web-hosted project spaces can be enhanced to meet the flexibility, democracy and transparency required for such studies to work.