Global Sensemaking

Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems

What should be on the agenda for our first conference call?

Suggestions received so far:

(1) Quick introductions

(2) Brief overview of Mark K's and Luca's Naples experiment.

(3) Process issues, e.g.:

> What are our objectives in gathering as a group?
> Thoughts on the best ways to achieve these objectives?
> Where/how do we co-ordinate communication?
> Opening the group to other participants?
> Opening the group to a wider audience?

Please feel free to add any further suggestions to this thread.

David

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Thanks, Simon: that's a great list.

I'll consolidate all the suggestions received here by Wednesday morning into a final agenda, which I'll post here and circulate to the group via e-mail later on Wednesday.

David
Interesting issue: who are we?

The notion of becoming an international consultancy, for me, doesn't satisfy. Let me say why. Jerry Glenn is posing open questions regarding something he calls GENIS: Global Energy Network Information System. The questions, not all of which he asks, but which are entailed in his inquiry, open the door to the nature of inquiry itself.

I think that the web is providing an opportunity, and Hypermedia Discourse "wants" to rise to the challenge of finding ways in which a larger crowd composed of members of different tribes can "own" part of the solution. That opportunity suggests that something other than an international consultancy is called for. Sure, there will be international consultancies; they'll likely (if not already) spring up as fast as people can grab domain names. Rather, I see the opportunity in the same light I'm writing my thesis, the same light Jerry casts on the whole: collective sensemaking, and the means to federate the many different world views entailed by the sensemakers.

This website is useful, but, remains existence proof of room for improvement. DebateGraph lines up the issues. This site lets us talk about them in more depth and breadth than one would want to see in an IBIS dialogue map. As I see it, the room for improvement lies in the coherence relations that Cohere brings to the table, and also in something that even Cohere does not yet appear to provide: subject-centric indexing. Right now, I have no way other than google to find instances of subjects mentioned in either of the two portals, DebateGraph and this one. I have no way to figure out which member of this tribe said something about a particular subject without a lot of overhead work.

If we want to make a dent in global issues, energy and climate being seamlessly joined at the hips dues to their many intertwingled actors and relationships, we need to engage in the fabrication of a federation.

That, I think, calls for a lot of really hard work in terms of what the necessary APIs are for such a federation, and the design of a means by which the work products sequestered behind those APIs can be uniformly represented and indexed. While that's the subject of my thesis project, there are two reasons why I think the task is way larger than just one thesis project: we might be running out of time (according to some pundits), and, frankly, it's way larger than me, or even KMi and me together.

Some like-minded topic mappers and others are getting together later this year to talk about this subject. See
http://knowledgefederation.org/
for more information.

Jack
Thanks Jack: some excellent observations and suggestions for discussion on Thursday (and Peter and I are very happy in principle for Debategraph to feed into a federated process of this kind).

A quick update on the state of play with the Knowledge Federation conference and whether there's still scope for the collaborative project emerging here to feed into the proceedings would be welcome on Thursday too.

David
What are the rules of engagement here? Would I be out of line inviting some of the federation folks in here?
The underlying question is definitely one for the conference call agenda; however ahead of the call, I am very happy for you to trust your own instincts as to whether it would be helpful for the people you have in mind to participate in the call.

The same principle applies for everyone else in the group as well.

David
Ditto!

...and my immediate instinct would be that (Citrix?) Compendium would be the more natural tool for this.

David
I've got my tongue so deeply ensconced in cheek I'm liable to bite it off. But, there is an instance of a dialog mapping tool in TopicSpaces online that could be used. I'll confess that this would be its largest, to date, workout. The site is http://www.topicspaces.org:8080/wiki/ and the nav menu on the left will lead you to "Open Questions". It's on a really slow DSL, so be kind to it if you go there to investigate. Worst case is that the system isn't ready for such an exercise.
Jack (in response to your suggestion below),

Great: would you like to give us a brief on-screen demonstration during the conference call?

David
As things stand, 9 members of the group have indicated that they are planning to the attend the conference call:

Jack Park
Jack Paulus (if possible)
Jeff Conklin
Maarten Sierhuis
Mark Klein
Mark Aakhus
Luca Iandoli
Simon Buckingham Shum
David Price

So, barring a late rush, it looks like there's space available for a few more (if there's anyone else that anyone has in mind).
I'd like to invite Dino Karabeg, at the very least. He's taking the lead in organizing the federation conference and would have a better idea to what extent we can federate something from this group into the conference results.
Fine by me.

David
I'd like to update my comment here, particularly in regard to my reaction to Simon's "straw-person" idea of a global consultancy as not "satisfying". In some sense, I've started elsewhere here to suggest the notion of a "sensemaking forge" along the lines of sourceforge.net, a kind of incubator for sensemaking projects. Perhaps Simon's idea can satisfy. Cast in that light, I begin to imagine a kind of home for international consultants, a troupe, a loose federation of consultants that contribute to and use the tools of sensemaking. There's a potential financial sustainability model for the idea in jboss.org. JBoss is an open source "J2EE stack" that went against the grain of Sun's wishes and eventually changed the face of enterprise java. They did that by using an open source software platform as a framework on which to launch a services and training enterprise that ultimately proved financially valuable to RedHat; the software remains open source and every bit as powerful and popular as it ever was. In a "sourceforge" analogy, the sensemaking forge would host version control and project management services for just about all known sensemaking platforms as possible, using sensemaking tools in those projects. Eating one's own dogfood, indeed!
I see this as a way to address Jerry Glenn's GENIS initiative, to address the U.N.'s interest in a climate initiative, and a host of other emerging initiatives. In the healthcare domain, let me point to http://patientslikeme.com/ which is a kind of crowd-sourced medical self-help sensemaking portal that already has a financial model based on what I have called "anecdotal epidemiology".

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