Mapping the IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change
This Sunday I’ll be live mapping the debates at the marvellous IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
The festival, for which tickets are still available, has assembled a fascinating group of climate change speakers, including: Professor Mohan Munasinghe, Sir David King, Stanley Johnson, Professor Chris Rapley, Joan Ruddock, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Mark Woodall, Tony Juniper, Fiona Harvey, David Bellamy, Malini Mehra, Christine Loh, Isabel Hilton, Jonathon Counsell, Steve Koonin, Jeremy Leggett, Tom Burke, Ed Crooks, Michael Keating, and Oliver Tickell.
The full schedule encompasses a mixture of debates, seminars, and panel discussions, including: Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, Countdown to Armageddon – how long have we got?, Can Asia go green? Can technological innovation save us from disaster?, Green Herrings – what we need and needn’t bother doing, Biofuels – essential or a waste of time, UK political parties aren’t serious about climate change, Green Capitalists – a contradiction in terms?, Geoengineering – is it the silver bullet? Renewables – wind, solar & other – are they worth the bother?, and Bioperversity: An obituary for the world’s rainforests and other major ecosystems?
I’ll be aiming to map as many of points being made by the speakers on the day, and building on the initial seed maps over the subsequent days—and you’ll be able to follow the maps developing online on the IQ2 Green Festival website and on the Debategraph home page.
The current work in progress on the existing climate change map is shown below:
Feel free contribute to the debate maps from afar as they are developing, and if you are planning to attend the event with a laptop, join in and we can use the maps as an intelligent, multi-dimensional conference back channel.
I’m delighted to report as well that Anna De Liddo will be joining me to map the debates, and that Anna and I will be using the maps as one of the first building block in this year’s ESSENCE Collective Intelligence project on Climate Change in the build up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year.
Many thanks to Edie Lush and her team for conceiving and organizing the festival—and if you are planning to attend, don’t forget to say hello!
Mapping the Crisis in Gaza
As the What Should Obama Do Next? map began to address the unfolding events in Gaza last week, it was soon apparent that the immediate crisis and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict merited detailed consideration on a new map.
To this end, Independent readers and the Debategraph community have begun to seed a map on the crisis; including arguments raised by Robert Fisk and Johann Hari, and some of the questions and answers from the Twitter press conference organised last week by the Consulate General of Israel in New York.
The Gaza map (above)—which will require significant iteration and community input from a wide range of voices to reach maturity—is motivated by two medium-term objectives:
(1) to present the different worldviews that underpin the conflict fairly and succinctly on a common map.
(2) to map creatively and constructively the options open to the participants in the conflict and the international community, and the arguments for and against the different options.
This is an emotive subject, and the map is at an early stage of development; so if you see statements with which you disagree strongly or spot gaps in the arguments, please help us to address these on the map.
After logging-in, anyone can add new issues, positions and arguments, edit and restructure the map, and evaluate the different arguments; so the whole structure evolves as new perspectives are added to the map.
Hence, every aspect of the map at this stage should be regarded as mutable and provisional—with the aim being to enrich the structure iteratively and collaboratively until the map reflects a maximum of community intelligence.
As with the Obama map, you can also keep up to date with developments on the Gaza map via @TheIndyDebate on Twitter.
Cross posted at: Independent Minds
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