Developing the toolkit...

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A space to draw together group discussion about: (1) the appropriate technical platform for the development of Global Sensemaking project; (2) how we enable data to flow between existing tools; and (3) the shape of the tools to come.
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Enabling Sensemaking via Social Networking Sockets

by Mark Szpakowski

May 21, 2008

Here's one part of a solution: enable each Sensemaking tool with Friend Connect (Friend Connect is here used somewhat generically - Facebook Connect, for example, might be a powerful tool to use as well) capable APIs or widgets, so that the following use cases might be enabled:

- a Sensemaking tool allows the members of an existing group of practitioners on some site to use the tool as a group. Ie, the group's social network information is used to auto-setup the login and permissions for using the tool.

- a practitioners' site sucks in a dynamic representation of a Sensemaking tool's work output (into a page or widget on its own site)

- a practitioners' site allows a Sensemaking tool (and its users) access to data on the practitioners' site.

I'm using the term practitioner to refer to a target user of Sensemaking tools, such as a climate scientist, a policy maker, an advisor, a strategist, a publicist, an artist, etc.

The basic idea is to take a distributed and networked approach to the idea of platform. Let the Sensemaking tool makers focus on making and offering the best tools, while providing them with connectivity sockets so that the people who could make best use of them do so with the least friction, and keep on using the discussion and other tools they already have.
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    Mark Szpakowski

    A plus here is that Ning supports OpenSocial and, soon, Friend Connect.
    1

    May 21, 2008

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      Andy Streich

      "a dynamic representation of a Sensemaking tool's work output" -- that's an important concept to me. What are the characteristics of a Sensemaking tool's work output?

      Seems to me we're faced with the fundamental problem of deciding on a knowledge representation scheme in the absence of any well-defined criteria. Or am I off in left field?
      3

      May 22, 2008

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        Jack Park

        Mark, I'd like to play with this thread for a moment. My suspicion is that your vision sees things at the quantum level while I'm still out here in the clouds trying to see molecules. If I'm reading your statements anywhere near what you are thinking, then I'm seeing something along the lines of individual web services servers that do small, simple things like, say DebateGraph if we restrict our needs to something like just letting us create and manipulate IBIS maps, or maybe Cohere, which allows us to send it things that we then go in and wire up with coherence relations, all of which we can bring back to our site when someone wants to roam our site. "Our site" would be, say, a climate site, or maybe some subset such as hurricanes--your practitioners. That way, anybody could toss up a CMS that does blogging or something else, and just authenticate with various services and compose their own sensemaking site. Am I close?

        May 24, 2008