What should Obama do Next? The Independent series launches…
In the build up to Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, The Independent and Debategraph have teamed up to give the world a chance to map and explore what Obama should do next. Click here for the map.
Over the next 10 weeks, Independent readers and the Debategraph team will develop a series of interrelated debate maps of the key policy and political questions facing Obama as he prepares for office.
Whether it’s tackling the global financial crisis, deciding who to appoint to key cabinet posts, or determining how to proceed on climate change, Iraq or the crisis in the Congo, you are welcome to join us in building comprehensive maps of the political choices open to Obama, the arguments for and against the different options, and the path you think Obama should follow.
Each week, we’ll be seeding the maps with an article from The Independent or The Independent on Sunday and beginning to layer in the positions and arguments from the Obama team’s published agenda and public statements.
You can watch the maps evolve in the build up to the inauguration, or better still register and begin to comment, suggest new issues, rate the options and arguments, and add new options and arguments of your own.
I’ll describe the process in more detail over the coming weeks, but for now we have seeded the opening map on The Independent’s website with the arguments from Philip Bobbitt’s article The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world (examining some of the international policy options open to Obama), and Leonard Doyle’s Obama Starts to Build a ‘Team of Rivals’ (considering whether Obama should appoint Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State).
To learn more about the map visualization, roll over the arrows, spheres and buttons above. Click on a small sphere to drill deeper into the debate graph: click on the largest sphere to return up through the graph.
Introducing ESSENCE 2009…
During the pre-launch phase, we are beginning to identify and assemble teams of scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers to work with the tool developers on specific aspects of the complex set of issues around climate change.
The aim is to develop a comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, that will be available for all to explore and enrich across the web.
The project is founded on principles of openness, transparency, and discovery; with no preconceptions about the conclusions that will emerge from the event.
If you are scientist, industrialist, campaigner, policy maker, tool maker—or someone with other ideas and resources to contribute—and are interested in learning more about and participating in ESSENCE, please get in touch.
Ready?… / …Engage
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Visualizing the American Choice
As Americans congregate at the polls and the world looks on in wonder, I thought that would be interesting to visualize the choice as seen through the eyes of the endorsement editorials of the Washington Post (which came out in favour of Obama) and the Washington Times (which came out in favour of John McCain)…
…with the arguments presented in the Election FAQ overview created by Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, layered in below for extra texture:
Mapping Obama’s Speech in Berlin
As announced on the Global Sensemaking blog, and building on Tim Bonnemann’s excellent Wordle and Mark Szpakowski’s suggestion, I produced a draft map of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin yesterday, which you can view and explore here.
The snapshot below displays the top layer of the map, and you are welcome to log-in and improve both the top layer and the underlying structure of the first draft.
As noted in the earlier post, the preparation of the first draft of the map emphasised the different senses, dimensions and saliencies of the speech that emerge via the different forms and interpretations: video, transcript, Wordle, and map. And, no doubt, others experiencing Obama’s speech first via TV news analysis, newspaper reports, David Frum, a photograph, or at the speech itself would take away different senses too.
To illustrate how it is possible to develop this kind of mapping analysis further live on the web already, I have started to weave together the map and the transcript of the speech using the Future of the Book’s marvellous CommentPress tool to enable directly addressable, granular access to the text of Barack Obama’s speech, linked to the relevant sections of the map (and vice versa)—with a video clip layered into the latter example for good measure as well.
The granular addressability is shown at the paragraph level in this example; however, CommentPress—which is being applied imaginatively to several public consultations in the UK—allows the user to define a deeper level of granularity, enabling a finer one-to-one correspondence between the source document and the map.
The hope embodied in this experiment is that in the build up to the Presidential election in November it might be possible exemplify the potential of the emerging web technologies to shift the modus of political debate (a degree or two) away from the calculated cacophony of ephemeral soundbites toward a more considered, constructive and cumulative conversation.
If you are willing to help in the pursuit of this goal—working on the transcripts, mapping and tying together the arguments, highlighting inconsistencies and areas of agreement, and holding the candidates transparently accountable to their words—please join us.
Debate Mapping Obama’s VP choice…
In the wonderful way of the web, a generous invitation from Seb Schmoller to guest blog an overview post about Debategraph, led to encouraging and deeply insightful feedback from David Weinberger about Debategraph.
In a subsequent post, David called for transparent debate about Barack Obama’s choice of vice-presidential running mate, noting that:
“Barack Obama has promised to tear down the stone wall and dense bushes with which the current administration has barricaded the White House. Good. Democracy without transparency is at best assumed.
And, Obama has promised to take advantage of our new connective technology — the Internets and all its associated tubeware — to enable a level of citizen participation undreamed of since our population outgrew the local town hall.
So, how about if the campaign starts now by opening up the vice presidential selection process?”
…so here’s a debate map featuring some of the mooted VP candidates and the arguments for and against their candidacy. Anyone can add new candidates and new arguments. Anyone can rate the candidates and the arguments for and against. And anyone can embed this (automatically updating) map of the debate on their blog; so that changes made anywhere will be displayed everywhere.
Which is about as transparent as it gets.
Help us share the debate as widely as possible, and let’s find out what the collective and connective wisdom of the web makes of Obama’s potential running mates…
ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling
Thanks to David Osimo’s highly recommended blog on eGovernment 2.0, I was in Brussels at the end of last month to present our work-in-progress on Debategraph to the European Commission’s ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling Consultation Workshop Framework Programme VII.
It was a fascinating day, exploring the Information Society Directorate’s long-term research agenda in this field, against a background, outlined by David Broster Head of Unit for eGovernment and CIP Operations, of the movement of web 2.0 tools from the social and professional domain into the political and policy domains (see slide below).
Among the many excellent and thought-provoking presentations to the workshop, Anthony D. Williams’s (co-author of Wikinomics) on Wikinomics and the Future of Government and Governance, and Andy Mulholland (Global CTO of Cap Gemini) on From National Citizen to Web Citizen, had a particularly powerful resonance from my perspective.
The full set of presentations is available here.
The cluster of institutions working on interrelated projects and arriving at similar conclusions from different angles signalled strong validation for the approach that we are implementing and the goals that we are pursuing, and the enthusiasm with which Debategraph was greeted on the day was tremendously encouraging and much appreciated.
The next big event on the calendar, in Lyon, 25-27 November 2008, is highly recommended to everyone with an interest in eGovernance and eParticipation in Europe.
To be, or not to be, that is the debate map
A light-hearted debate map of Hamlet’s existential dilemma in Act III Scene I, to commemorate the 444th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth on 23 April 1564.
Without further ado, here’s the soliloquy—the medium in which sensitive young men worked out their feelings pre-YouTube:
“To be, or not to be, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?”
…and here’s the map of Hamlet’s internal struggle (complete with the embed code for his MySpace blog):
So, how do you rate Hamlet’s arguments—does the proud man’s contumely really sting more than the pangs of dispriz’d love? Either way, I guess Valleywag has the story covered—and, at the risk of a skewed sample, what do you make of Hamlet’s conclusion?
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action.”
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