Concertina is the best tool available world-wide that assists Facilitators trained and certified in Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) to conduct face-to-face Co-Laboratories (term preferred to workshops to emphasize the fact that participants collaborate authentically to explore the challenges and converge to consensus).

It is structured in a way that makes it very easy for Facilitators, Assistants and Participants to follow the steps of the process.

The Dashboard is where summary information appears, and from where the user can jump to any particular section of the system. It is also the place from where a new project or a new dialogue can be created.

Concertina is specifically designed to assist stakeholders address and resolve complex issues in a reasonably limited amount of time.

The platform supports three types of dialogues, which can be implemented separately, or in different combinations:

• Vision/Futures Scenario
• Anticipation Challenges/Barriers
• Action Planning

Once inside a (new) Dialogue, the Left Menu allows one to implement the process, as well as to jump to any particular step. It is organized in sections:

• Set Up: Allows the user to enter and edit all information regarding the specific Dialogue.
• Steps: Is organized in subsections, to support the Facilitator go through the Generation of Observations, their Clarification and Clustering, then to conduct Preference Voting and enter the results in the system, and finally construct an Influence Structure searching for Influence Relations among pairs of ideas. The Mapping Step uses the Interpretive Structural Modeling algorithm to reduce the time required to complete the process.
• Reports: Allows both corporate (typically referred to as Facilitators) and individual (typically referred to as Participants) users to view and print all kinds of reports regarding the content and results of the Dialogue.
• Tools: Includes various functionalities such as Archive, Delete, and Export (as XML file) a Dialogue.

It supports them to interpret the results of their deliberation.