Debategraph provides a novel way for geographically dispersed groups to collaborate in real-time in thinking through complex issues.

It does so by enabling groups of any size to externalise, visualize, question, and evaluate all of the considerations that anyone thinks might be relevant to the issues at hand – and by facilitating an intelligent, constructive dialogue around those issues.

Whether the group is a small team, an organization, a network of organizations, or society as a whole, the ability to augment our individual capacity to choose wisely in the face of the complex, multi-dimensional problems we confront today is ever more pressing.

Peter and I co-founded Debategraph in 2006 with the social entrepreneurial goal of creating a new form of public service communication in which the best arguments on all sides of any policy debate would freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

In the iterative pursuit of this goal, we have been lucky to collaborate on a stimulating range of projects with amongst others: Amanpour on CNN, the Prime Minister’s Office, the White House open government team, The Independent newspaper, and with partners for the European Commission – with all of the public maps forming intersecting parts of a single, emerging graph of thought.

The field in which we are working with other teams is still nascent, and as pioneers together we are still exploring the two-fold challenge of making the tools as simple and natural to use as possible and of cultivating wider literacy and fluency in these structured expressions of thought.

There’s much still to be accomplished with both dimensions of this challenge; however the long-term potential that inspires us to pursue this field can be seen in two of our current projects.

In the first, we are working with the support of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office to develop a large scale map of the nuclear politics domain. Although the map is still in the early stages of development it already encompasses over a thousand ideas expressed from multiple perspectives – and its utility will grow significantly as the branches broaden and deepen to capture the expertise embodied in all of the relevant sub-disciplines and all of the different international perspectives on the key policy issues.

In the second, we have seeded a map with the new Coalition’s programme for government – and subsequently the Bills set out in the Queen’s Speech and the spending cuts proposed – offering a tantalising glimpse of how this collaborative mapping approach could be applied to track the entire policy agenda of the government across its full term in office.

New policy proposals can be added to the map as they emerge, and the map can track what happens when the proposals are implemented. Contradictions and inconsistencies between the measures being developed in different departments of government can be highlighted, and granular ratings can be used to signal the levels of support and opposition for the individual proposals and the salient reasons for this support or opposition.

It would fascinating, too, to begin to interconnect the map with the work being done on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s excellent Where Does My Money Go? project – as indeed it would be to interconnect the map on anthropogenic climate change with the CKAN Climate Change Group project – and if you would be interested in learning more about and/or collaborating on any aspect of our work, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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• Debategraph: Mapping the Mind of Government (independent.co.uk)
• Debategraph: Dissecting the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement (independent.co.uk)
• Debategraph: Nuclear politics – where next? (independent.co.uk)
• Debategraph: Visualizing the second leaders’ debate (independent.co.uk)
• Visualizing the Prime Ministerial Debates (independent.co.uk)

Technorati Tags: Climate Change, CNN, Collaboration, Colllective Inteligence, Debate, Debategraph, Deliberation, Democracy, Dialogue, Environment, European Commission, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Independent, Open Knowledge Foundation, Politics, Public Policy, Visual mapping, Visualization, White House, Wicked Problems

The Open Government Initiative moved into the third, and most significant, Drafting phase today—and we’re delighted to note that the White House’s Open Government team has entrusted this vital phase to our favourite wiki team at MixedInk (who, if you haven’t discovered them yet, offer a truly innovative and powerful approach to the task of collaborative writing, which is ready to be applied in multiple contexts).

The initial Open Government Brainstorming and Discussion phases have been stimulating and generative, but the real collaborative work, the real collaborative responsibility, and the real collaborative opportunity lie in the next phase of synthesis.

So get writing!

…and, to help you on your way, here’s the combined Debategraph of the redacted proposals from the three brainstorming sessions:

Technorati Tags: #eups20, Barack Obama, Beth Simone Noveck, Brainstorming, Collaboration, Collaborative Democracy, Collaborative writing, Debategraph, Gov20, Mind map, MixedInk, OGov, Open Gov, Open Government, Open Government Initiative, Participation, Transparency, United States, Visual Policy Mapping, Visualization, Vivek Kundra, White House, Whtie House, Wiki

Among many virtues, Sandy was one of the main enablers of the Public Engagement Principles (PEP) Project—launched in response to Barack Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government—with the goal of articulating the fundamental components of quality public engagement (as understood by leading practitioners in the field).

The resulting seven principles—developed collaboratively by, among others, members of the NCDD, IAP2 and the Co-Intelligence Institute—have won widespread praise and endorsement, and as others have noted are applicable across many domains.

In conversation with Sandy at the eDemocracyCamp, we thought that it might be fun to create a representation of the principles as an interactive Debategraph, the result of which is shown below:

…and for anyone around in San Francisco this evening, tonight’s IAP2 Symposium on The Future of Public Participation—which features presentations from Moira Deslandes and Tim Bonnemann, and at which the principles will be discussed—is highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Debategraph, Deliberation, Dialogue, eDemocracyCamp, Good Practice, IAP2, NCDD, Open Government, Politics, Public Engagement, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, Society and Culture, Visualization, Washington

Building on the Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels early this year, and at the initiative of David Osimo and Paul Johnston, we are teaming up other partners to crowdsource an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 to sit alongside November’s ministerial declaration.

Echoing the Open Government initiatives currently underway at the White House, the process is beginning with an open brainstorming session to identify and evaluate a range of ways in which EU governments can harness the emerging power of the web to transform European public services.

We would love you to participate in this process by adding your suggestions and voting for others here before 15th July.

More details, including the plans for the second collaborative phase and the subsequent public endorsement are available here.

…and, in parallel with the formal process, I’ll be keeping an informal eye on the proposals as they develop via the debate map below:

Technorati Tags: #eups20, Brainstorming, E-Government, Europe, European Commission, Ministerial eGovernment Meeting, Open Government, Paul Johnston, Public Services, White House