From Debatemapper to the Debategraph…
An exciting time for us, with long-planned changes now live on the site—and the culmination of our first developmental phase, which began last summer with the pilot projects for the UK Prime Minister’s Office and the Royal Society for Arts.
The changes highlight both our social purpose—of building a global repository of public debate that’s freely available for all to see and for all to improve—and our vision of mapping not just individual debates but the cumulative graph of semantically interrelated debates.
There’s much for future discussion, but for now the main points are:
(1) A new name and URL to embody our public ethos and intent: www.debategraph.org.
(2) The adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license—the Creative Commons license closest in spirit to the Wikipedia GFDL license—for all material posted to the site henceforth. The license is the emerging standard for mass collaboration projects of this kind; as signalled by the recent announcements from Creative Commons, Wikipedia and Citizendium.
(3) The capability to interrelate and navigate through a cloud of semantically related debates—to see more clearly how debates shape, and are shaped by, each other—is now fully enabled within Debategraph.
Lots accomplished: and, as ever, lots still to do; with all feedback welcomed wholeheartedly.
…and come and join us at the start of a great adventure.
Rethinking Drugs Policy
Following the publication of the report by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy earlier this year, the Debatemapper team worked with the RSA to create a debate map of the case made in the report for rethinking UK drugs policy.
The map decomposes the report’s arguments into constituent elements, each of which is open to further refinement, challenge, comment and evaluation. You can see the top level structure of the map in the debate strand below.
The Commission’s report is intended to feed into the UK Government’s 2008 review of the National Drugs Strategy; for which a formal public consultation process is underway. You can read more about the RSA’s other initiatives in this context here.
The debate map is now open to editing, comment and evaluation by anyone with an interest in the drugs policy field, and we hope that over time a community of experts will form around the map to cultivate it as a permanent resource for drugs policy stakeholders in the UK and beyond.
With the wider international debate in mind – and to illustrate how Debatemapper can be used to build clusters of interrelated maps – we have also created a new map from an existing strand of the RSA debate map, which explores the arguments for and against the legalisation of drugs.
The top-level arguments are shown in the strand below. Like a wiki, the debate map is inherently provisional and open to further refinement. So if you spot any gaps or weaknesses in the arguments or if you have any new lines of thought or evidence to contribute, please feel free to sign in and start editing and evaluating the map straightaway. Video and text help is available directly from the map.
Get Blog Feed
