Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems

New Global Sensemakers

I'm brand new here and hope to contribute in a meaningful way. To do that, I need to know some basic stuff:

1. How does a new person enter the group? I'm just diving in with this post (after reading everything I could find). If nothing else, I can offer the perspective of a new member which is what I'm doing with these words.

2. What's the state of play with respect to forming a group purpose, vision, target, or (to be very prosaic) set of deliverables? I've seen the discussion of tools, but without some goal statement or something akin to use-cases, I can't engage in that. I'd like to engage. Tools are something I have some experience creating and delivering in a commercial setting.

Perhaps someone can point me to information I've missed and perhaps as a way of engaging I can help create some of the things I'm seeking.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 17, 2008 at 14:50

Hi Andy.

My impression, and I have been here just a couple of weeks, is that things are still very much in the formative stage. The group just decided on a new, more inclusive and mission-oriented name and now I think there is a period of 'sensemaking' going on in each contributor's mind. Activity has been low of late.

In any case, as I understand it, your ideas and thoughts are as cogent as anyones at this stage of development.

There is a lot of information outside of this site where various members have been working on their own independent projects. Right now, I think, some of the members are considering how their projects might be integrated into this common effort.

Anyone else, please feel free to add or clarify.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Streich on May 20, 2008 at 8:02

Hi George,

I'll just dive in. Perhaps trying to sharpen the group focus or further delineate some of the goals/wishes of the members will encourage greater activity. I know I'd find it encouraging so that's what I'll look into in the near term. I've left my own blog go fallow for the last six weeks or so as I've been thinking about what direction to take it. Investigating what the members here are doing, have been doing, say they are interested in, etc. will likely stimulate my own thinking. So I'll do that and write up my thoughts.

I've read your ConsensUs outline and found it interesting if a bit daunting in scope (unless you give me a programming team and serious funding!). More to say about that later.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 21, 2008 at 0:34

Hi Andy,
I just browsed your blog and think that George's instinct to invite you here was spot on. Your interests in software development and collecting and analyzing data fit the needs of this tribe quite well. I hope to discuss these ideas with you further; it seems to me that any federation of sensemakers ought to have ready access to all data necessary to make claims and justify positions and arguments. Looking forward to your contributions here. Finding serious funding is certainly one of the issues.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Streich on May 21, 2008 at 18:39

Thanks, Jack.

"seems to me that any federation of sensemakers ought to have ready access to all data necessary to make claims and justify positions and arguments" -- that's something I've been interested in for a long time. It's one thing to organize a meeting of stakeholders and work through some sensemaking activity were everyone is working from the same data, and quite another when we can't agree on what the data is.

My instinct is to push on such issues to find some common ground on which to build the discussion. To that end, using this social network as an example, I've been looking into the member profiles here asking: Who are these people? What's their background? What are their interests? What are their goals? Where's the common theme?

So far (looking at the initial eight or so members) I've found that the members of GlobalSensemaking are quite accomplished and come with impressive credentials. What remains fuzzy is the group's goal. That's an invigorating question. What would success look like? How would you measure it?

I've been in the commercial sphere for some time now, so my approach is colored by that. I'm interested in how quickly this group can enter into an explicit prototype-evaluate-adjust loop -- not in tool development (that's a different domain), but in terms of group growth and purpose.

One part of me is quite willing to wait until something coalesces enough to allow an explicit statement of purpose to emerge. Another part wants to stimulate that process because that's a role I'm used to playing as an engineering manager tasked with getting a product out the door.

Last I checked there were 33 members of this group so I'm interested in testing various ideas about the group's purpose. What are we doing? Why are we here?

There are at least several people here who know something about group dynamics and decision making. So I expect some of those people to take the lead in, for lack of a better term, team building.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 21, 2008 at 23:23

I have this imagination that runs wild from time to time. One thread that keeps coming back to haunt me is the idea that we could put up a load of data, say, like the world oil consumption dataset over at ManyEyes, maybe even import some visualizations of that data, then post some questions for kids (of all ages) in classrooms (at all levels) to discuss, conduct modeling exercises with, and so forth.

My own focus is on federation of all information resources, such as turning the nodes of a dialogue/issue/argument map into subjects in a topic map such that, in the dialogue map view, you get to see how that node relates to the conversation, but, perhaps there are many more things to know about the content of that node; switch views to, say, an energy, or climate view to see where that node (its subject(s)) reside in a larger picture. But, I want those nodes to be generated with access to the largest amount of ground truth in the form of raw data, reference citations, etc, as possible.

I am starting to think seriously along the lines of, let's just call it: Global Sensemaking University.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Streich on May 22, 2008 at 0:38

I love your idea, Jack. It has the virtue of being a concrete experiment given that you or some proxy for you manages the modeling exercise.

Creating a "Global Sensemaking University" is a wonderful goal.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 22, 2008 at 1:04

I just attached a file here. In fact, Sorry, I couldn't find a place to upload files globally other than photos and movies. If it's here, I missed it.

The paper is a talk given by BobTrelease from the UCLA Med School in 2003 to a Qualitative Reasoning conference. In the paper, we describe a candidate bio-modeling portal--not unlike the kind of sensemaking portal about which I harp here. The paper describes my qualitative modeling program TSC (stands for The Scholar's Companion) that blooms an "envisionment" (graph model) rooted in some initial conditions, as bloomed by process rules that fire against nodes that contain representations (as if on a theatrical stage) of actors, relationships, and states). The program was used to successfully discover new process control rules for polymer curing in autoclaves, and has been used in several bio-medical modeling exercises as reported in other papers by Bob Trelease. QP Theory is due to Kenneth Forbus from MIT. Googles well.

TSC has been transliterated from its original Forth implementation on a Macintosh to Java and is being adapted to run on the knowledge base maintained by TopicSpaces. It uses a tuplespace agent coordination system such that other instances of TSC can participate, similar to seti@home. There's much more to say about it, perhaps in a different thread about modeling tools.

Think of TSC as a proxy for me and anyone else who wants to charge it with initial conditions and ask what happens next.

I personally discovered what, for me, was a set of unconnected dots while battling a Leukemia: when you are a compromised host (weak immune system), you don't want to be taking high dose antioxidants. The reasons for that were made clear while inspecting an envisionment of an immune response to bacterial antigen as modeled in TSC.

Modest claim: we need modeling of that kind and others (e.g. Stella as suggested by Bob Parks in a following post) in any good sensemaking platform.

Attachments:

aime03tre2.pdf, 469 KB

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Permalink Reply by Robert Parks on May 22, 2008 at 0:44

Jack,
This is a great idea! Several years ago some students at Berkeley set up a national budget simulation. I used it in a class I was teaching, but it didn't have discussion capabilities. And it wasn't a dynamic simulation. (The only link I found seems to be a dead link.)

Are you familiar with Stella? I used it many years ago in a class. It was easy enough to teach students to use. And very simple simulations can be created and distributed. Unfortunately, Stella simulations can't be used on the web without extra effort. But the idea of a very simple simulation tool, showing dependencies in a system - for example, an exponential growth, or predator-prey simulation - could be very powerful, if it is presented in a context of discussion threads. For example, the "Grains Gone Wild" argument map you developed could have an overlaid (or undergirding) systems simulation - with data on effects of weather, increasing meant consumption, increasing oil prices, etc. Not all links would have data dependencies, but the interface between abstract arguments and warranting data could be powerful. I think this is an excellent project for this group to take on as a demonstration.
What do you think?
Bob

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 22, 2008 at 1:14

Stella has crossed my visual path in the past. Not a strong enough memory to resurrect with any precision. In a reply to an earlier post, I uploaded a file in which I describe a qualitative modeling/discovery platform. There are certainly numeric modeling environments that should go together with it for sensemaking experiments.

I wrote an export for the TSC process rules to a cellular automata (game of life) simulator, then loaded that simulator with the initial conditions given to exercise those rules. The CA simulator would return numeric population numbers to TSC after TSC built its envisionment; TSC would take each population record and turn it into representations as found in episodes of the qualitative model, then search the envisionment to see where the returned data fit. From there, it would set an expectation of what the next data transmission should return; it behaves as an anticipatory system. When an expectation failure occurred, TSC would issue an expectation failure event and give itself a task of studying the failure.

The PhD project that used those features to model polymer curing was able to create new rules that bloomed a revised envisionment and better predicted and controlled an autoclave.

When TSC is married with TopicSpaces, its envisionment nodes will automatically become new subjects and will be merged into the topic map; they then inherit all of the sensemaking tools available to the topic map and its federation.

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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 23, 2008 at 1:09

Whoa, Jack. This is a very interesting idea. A virtual university attached to this whole effort is a great way to attract qualified participants and disseminate research, etc. It would be a place for scholars to aggregate work already done and present it in courses under the various topics that we are tackling. Perhaps we should include another top level topic (argument) in the map that David generated. Call it Making Sense in Education Challenges.

I have blogged often about the deficiencies in education (where does one start or end). It would be great to start from scratch and create a learning environment where kids and adults can study the issues/challenges and become productive participants in the discussions aimed at solving the problems.

I really like this idea.

George