CREDO: a human-centric decision Intelligence framework that turns community from communication to coordinated action

Community collaboration systems (CCSs) facilitate communication but often struggle to turn discussions into coordinated, accountable actions. This challenge arises because decisions, such as who decides what, when, based on which evidence, and with what safeguards, tend to stay implicit, particularly when AI is introduced. The problem is a human-centric integration: designing decision support that augments judgment while preserving meaningful human control. To address this gap, we use Design Science Research to develop CREDO, a five-stage Decision Intelligence framework for CCS design: Contextualize, Represent decisions, Evaluate consequences via risk–impact profiling, Design human–technology roles, and Operationalize & Optimize workflows. CREDO centers a Decision Blueprint that is progressively enriched with consequence constraints, four human–AI configuration modes, and mappings from decisions to functions, technologies, safeguards, and metrics. The result is a prescriptive method to engineer decision-intelligent CCSs. We illustrate CREDO with a crisis-response scenario to demonstrate applicability and traceability in practice.