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.
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.
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.
ESSENCE is the world’s first global climate collective intelligence event—designed to bring together scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers, and the emerging set of web-based sensemaking tools, to pool and deepen our understanding of the issues and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The event, starts online in January 2009 and culminates in a conference at the National e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, in April 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.
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 speechitself would take away different senses too.
The granular addressability is shown at the paragraph level in this example; however, CommentPress—which is being applied imaginatively to several publicconsultations 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.
Question: What do you get if you cross a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging, and social bookmarking with an argument map?
Answer: Debategraph.org
I started to collaborate on Debategraph with, my co-founder, Peter Baldwin in 2005. It’s one of those delightfully unlikely collaborations that the Internet makes possible: I’m based in Somerset in the UK and Peter is based in the Blue Mountains in Australia. We discovered each other, across the net, because we had two things in common: a shared perception of a problem and a shared idea for a solution.
The perceived problem is that the way that we address and resolve complex and contentious issues in public life is broken—and it is broken at a time when it has never been more important for those systems to function effectively. This is not an original conclusion, and it’s one that othershavediscussedelsewhereat length, but it was a conclusion that flowed directly from our personal experience: in Peter’s case as a former minister of higher education and cabinet minister for social security in the Keating administration in Australia, and in my case as a former advisor to, amongst others, H.M. Treasury, DCMS, DTI, and Ofcom.
What really brought us together though was not the diagnosis but the perception of a potential solution. This perception was threefold, that:
contentious and complex debates can be mapped comprehensively so that all pertinent issues, positions, arguments, evidence, and scenarios are represented in a transparent and coherent visual structure;
the web can be used to externalise and open up this process to anyone interested in contributing to, rating, or simply exploring the map; and
mapping debates in this way would benefit individuals and society.
In essence, debate mapping involves three steps:
breaking down the subject debated into meaningful parts;
identifying the relationships between those parts; and,
presenting the parts and their relationships visually.
To illustrate this:
The image above shows a small strand of a map beginning to explore the options open to the international community in response to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology. A policy option—zero domestic enrichment in return for offshore supply—is identified and an argument in support of this position suggested—that the option would defuse the international crisis without disrupting the existing nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
A large map is simply made up of many of these kinds of small combinations of thought boxes.
The contents of each box can be edited and rated over the web, and anyone can add new boxes (issues, arguments, and positions etc) to the map. Each box also has an underlying detailed display to which images, charts, tables, full-length essays, free form comments and links to external documents can be added. As well as forming part of the vertical tree structure, the boxes can be semantically linked to any other box in the same map or different map(s).
Collaborative editing of the maps across the web makes it possible for the collective knowledge and insights distributed across the entire community of interested participants to accumulate in the map. Anyone who spots a gap or a loose end in the map or who identifies a new option can add this to the map immediately for all to see. In this way, initial seed maps can evolve towards mature and comprehensive views of debates to which, at least temporally, no one has anything else to add.
Second, the maps provide a way to systematise the dialogue and deliberation processes used in, for example, the Harvard Negotiation Project and citizen juries across society. Just as mediation creates a physical space in which a conflict can be explored and resolved, the debate maps provide an online context in which conflicting values and interests distributed across multiple stakeholders can be surfaced and addressed openly and in an explicitly reasoned way. There’s no presumption of underlying consensus, but methods of this kind can facilitate the discovery of unforeseen creative solutions if they are there to be found.
Third, the transparency and openness of the maps help to engender trust in the policy making process on the part not just of the participants but also the observing majority. The transparency also makes it harder for the debate to be spun for political, commercial or media effect—and, by making the reasoning behind decisions explicit, the maps also bring a degree of retrospective accountability and learning to the decision making process.
Fourth, as each idea, position, and argument only has to be stated once on the map, the process is highly time efficient in comparison to traditional consultation methods in which multiple documents from different sources end up rehashing many of the same arguments (all of which have to be written and read each time). Freeing people from writing and reading redundant material creates a cognitive surplus that can be focused on the substance of the debate.
We launched Debategraph.org in the spring this year as a free, creative commons, social venture and are proud signatories to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration and enthusiastic participants in the Open Knowledge movement. The content on the site is growing steadily, and as more people become familiar with the mapping approach, our goal is for Debategraph to mature into a significant public resource: a global map of interrelated debates in which the best arguments on all sides of any contentious public issue are continuously available for all to see and for all to improve.
In the short term, we are embarking on an international project on climate change with various public and private sector partners, including the MIT and the Open University. And, in preparation for this, we have just released a new feature that lets you embed automatically updating snapshots of debates on blogs and websites (see the Iran map example below).
There’s much still to be done though: we’re in an early phase of our long-term development, with plenty of scope for refining and simplifying the user interface and for introducing different map visualisations, and there are significant social and cultural challenges ahead too. So if you are a natural pioneer, interested in experimenting with Debategraph in a field that matters to you and in helping to fulfill the nascent potential of this new category of tool, we would love to hear from you.
UPDATE: With the conference over for this year, here are a couple of video interviews recorded at the event by (the thankfully ubiquitous) David Wilcox:
I love the simplicity of the CommentOnThis and CommentPress approach, which is clearly motivated by similar urge to transparency and read/write participation as Debategraph.
The document-centric approach of CommentOnThis / CommentPress also makes it comparatively simple to enable public participation once the initial time, energy and resources has been expended on creating the original consultation documents.
Debategraph takes a more radical, subject-oriented approach to the same challenge, which if followed to its logical conclusion could (we think) significantly reduce the overall time spent by the consulting body and its stakeholders on the consultation process.
Instead of creating a long consultation document at the outset, the consultation team could start building a public debate map of the consultation issues, and invite the stakeholders to join them in this process—decomposing the subject matter into the individual issue, positions, arguments, evidence and scenarios, and allowing the stakeholders as well as the consultation team to edit, rate, challenge or support the individual arguments.
As each element on the map is also its own wiki-page it’s easy to layer in longer commentaries (up to 50,000 words), images, tables, and charts etc as the map builds towards maturity. And as the core, hierarchical structure of the map is similar to the hierarchical outline of a standard report, it’s relatively straightforward at the end of the consultation period to automatically generate the basis of a final report directly from map—with the a key difference being that everyone’s contributions are already represented in the report.
In this way, rather than having multiple people create multiple documents that redundantly repeat many of the same arguments (each of which has to be written and read multiple times), everyone can focus collaboratively and directly on the issues at hand and ensure that all pertinent considerations and all voices are represented fairly on the map. Visualising and exploring the issues and arguments in this way also enhances transparency and trust in the consultation process and helps to ensure that every issues is surfaced and addressed comprehensively.
As well as potentially reducing the cycle time of the consultation process, the debate map could save further time and resources when the next consultation round on the topic begins; as many of the relevant arguments will already be in place on the map and will not need to be recreated from scratch. Indeed, once created, the debate map can be updated over time by the different stakeholders as new arguments, evidence and scenarios emerge; providing a continuously evolving view of the subject; so that when the next formal consultation process begins the majority of the thinking and work involved may have been accomplished on the map already.
(2) The second PSB reminder is that TechCrunch and the BBC are holding a debate at Broadcasting House on 25th June to discuss the issues around the BBC’s assets and technology prompted by the debates here and here.
The debate will be chaired by Steve Bowbrick, with an impressive list of speakers:
* Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet.
* James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.
Web startups and developers are encouraged to attend, with tickets available here. And for anyone interested in exploring the debate in detail in advance or afterwards I have seeded a debate map here:
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