Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems

George E. Mobus Male Gig Harbor, Washington United States: Share; Share on Twitter; Share on Facebook

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Population

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Human Nature

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Steering Committee

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Energy Challenges

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Global Sensemaking Unive…

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George E. Mobus's Discussions

Philosophical aspects of sensemaking and operational definitions
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Started this discussion. Last reply by George E. Mobus Jan. 23, 2009.

A sense of urgency and how much effort here
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Started this discussion. Last reply by Mark Klein May. 27, 2008.

A new name, a proposed approach
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Started this discussion. Last reply by David Price May. 14, 2008.

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Latest Activity

Genene joined George E. Mobus's group

Population

Over population has to be considered in the mix of solutions to global issues. This group is dedicated to discussions of how population size and growth rates impact all of the other issues being discussed.

February 22

Genene joined George E. Mobus's group

Human Nature

Driving everything else in forming our world are human decisions and actions. Human nature ultimately holds the key to understanding why our world is going in the direction it is. This group is dedicated to explorations of HN in this context.

February 22

Sébastien Paquet joined George E. Mobus's group

Human Nature

October 14, 2009

Daniel LaLiberte commented on George E. Mobus's group 'Steering Committee'

Hey folks, I am very glad to find this network and group. I have been setting up various "Global Consensus" groups, and looking for supporting software and services. Like George, I also have a sense that Google's Wave looks promising. Their built-in…

July 4, 2009

Daniel LaLiberte joined George E. Mobus's group

Steering Committee

Members of the GSm network who have volunteered to help make sense of sensemaking and organizing the activities for the future.

July 4, 2009

Daniel LaLiberte joined George E. Mobus's group

Population

July 4, 2009

Daniel LaLiberte joined George E. Mobus's group

Human Nature

July 4, 2009

Daniel LaLiberte joined George E. Mobus's group

Energy Challenges

This group will explore the issues of global energy challenges. It takes energy to do work and adaptation to climate change, food production, and many other challenges will require adequate energy supplies that do not pollute the environment further.

July 4, 2009

Profile Information

About me:

Associate Professor of Computing & Software Systems, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma.

I have a wide range of interests including deliberative, collaborative discourse systems, energy systems management and engineering (did solar energy in my younger days!), modeling said systems, ecological economics, evolutionary neuropsychology, biologically-realistic simulated neural networks and learning theory, and... Believe it or not they all have something in common. They are all related through systems science and information theory (a sub-discipline of the former). I have an undergraduate degree in biology, an MBA in management science, and a PhD in Computer Science so maybe that explains the seeming breadth. But really, I just like learning stuff.

Web site:

http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/

Comment Wall (13 comments)

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At 7:51pm on June 10, 2009, Lynne Johnson said…: Yes, it is. And Bravo! Carry on. We'll connect. Lynne

At 7:21pm on June 10, 2009, Lynne Johnson said…: Just joined. I like learning stuff too. I also have a long-standing passion for dialogue, our earth, our wicked problems v a more peaceful planet, and a congruent walk trough this life. Plus I have a couple of old visions for tools that could only come to life in cyberspace (is that term still used?), and this generates curiosity in computer apps. I'm a systems thinker by nature and a resource developer by profession and practice, as well as a writer and all those other things I gave in my bio. Hope that this net will be as fascinating and productive as my hunch tells me it will be. Lynne

At 4:25am on September 11, 2008, Scott said…: George,

I was in high hopes when I first discovered the GSm, because of the similarities of my ambitions with the Do Good Gauge. Before the GSm, I customized over one hundred letters to various authors, universities / professors, politicians, and journalist over a 8 month period. The approach got me about 10% response and about 2% meaningful but short lived dialog.

My initial posts and responses to the GSm Ning were promising. An extended email exchange with Jack Park was a great learning experience for myself and I would hope provided some benefits for Jack.

Since then, I have found the GSm ning to lack direction, focus, or provide feedback.

Though I claim the requirement for developing a process for creating an intelligent argument is not necessary for the Do Good Gauge, I have thought much about this requirement. Specifically, I see Benjamin Franklin's Junto as an intelligent argument development process which has rarely been duplicated with such success and longevity. As a member of the House of Junto Google group, I initiated some thoughts about Benjamin Franklin's success with his Junto:

Was Franklin's Junto an Anomoly?

As a group, I feel the GSm is too focused on tools which granularize argument into such small grains that the problem is lost on the beach.

As a pragmatic software engineer, I believe it is better to develop software based on a working manual process. As a suggestion, I would recommend forming a Junto based on Benjamin Franklin's principles. Instead of focusing on the GSm tools, I would suggest this group collaborate to develop several intelligent arguments of publication quality. I would focus on narrow topics. An example could be, a patient managed medical record repository. I started a thread on the House of Junto to discuss this topic.

Scott's September Query - Patient Managed Medical Record Repository

The lessons learned by manually creating intelligent arguments could be beneficial to generating tools. Since the Do Good Gauge does not require the toolset for generating an intelligent argument, these manually generated arguments could be used as an inspiration for developing the Do Good Gauge framework.

George, I was hoping that your "Philosophical Aspect of Sense Making" topic would interest you in continuing this dialog. I would be glad to discuss with you on or off line.

Thank you for your time,
Scott Nesler

At 12:45am on August 6, 2008, Dave Gardner said…: Thanks. Great move, creating a population group, and look out!

At 12:43am on August 6, 2008, Dave Gardner said…: George, thanks for extending the hand of friendship. I look forward to this association!

At 7:31pm on July 28, 2008, Bernard Scott said…: Thanks, George. I look forward to learning more about GS.

At 12:54am on July 3, 2008, Brian Sullivan said…: Hi George

It was great to meet you and the others at DIAC. Thanks for remembering me. I had trouble recognizing you without your hat.

At 12:02am on May 23, 2008, David Horton said…: Um yes, but I feel a bit as I would looking into a store window in Japan, where the objects seem vaguely familiar but I am not totally sure what they are and I can't understand the labels!

At 5:54pm on May 10, 2008, Jack Park said…: Does the topic tree impose too much structure? Perhaps there is no support for an answer either way, but my own intuition, as is being expressed in my thesis project is that the topic tree is akin to the "secret sauce" that will help hypermedia discourse be more effective. I call it a topic map.
In my day job, we built a desktop platform called CALO that uses both LSA and LDA (topic modeling) to tease out of text resources important bits of focused information. We managed to put most of the cool stuff into an open source platform: OpenIRIS. I say that to respond to interest in using such methods in text mining. They remain important, but they do not solve everything. An even more interesting approach uses combinations of text tagging and concept mapping to harvest text. You can play with a search engine that uses the TextRunner algorithm here, and also find links to papers about it. I believe that the TextRunner algorithm can be improved in accuracy by shifting from a concept map to a topic map.
I used the term "sensemaking forge" in the same way we would talk about sourceforge.net; a portal that uses sensemaking tools of hypermedia discourse in support of the creation of sensemaking tools. When I built my first topic map/wiki platform, I noticed that I could write the source code in the wiki itself and use the topic map component to wire various methods, class variables, etc, to other discussions such as use cases, etc. Now, we know we can tag other websites offering algorithms, code, etc, to bits of code, use cases, requirements, whatever. The use of our tools in software development could mark a paradigm shift, perhaps the equivalent of the move from ISO methods to Extreme Programming. Perhaps.
My own topic map is online at http://www.topicspaces.org:8080/wiki/
I don't want that URL loose in google; the platform is running on a very slow DSL in my bedroom. Be kind to it. What you would see if you visit is, essentially, nothing. The front page greets you with an ajaxy drill-down navigator that sometimes works (have some css bugs still to remove). Ignore that. Visit Tagomizer, visit Blogs, visit other things including the Help and Feedback pages.
The ConsensUs project, in my mind, remains valuable.

At 2:47am on May 10, 2008, Jack Park said…: In response to your question if I think ConsensUs is worth further pursuit, my answer is a strong affirmative, with the following caveat: there's been a tremendous amount of water flowing under that bridge since you last wrote about it and I'd like to see how you factor all the recent developments into your thinking. At the very least, there may be other projects that could attract your enthusiasm and energy.

I'm not sure just how much collective energy there really is in this game of crafting portals to save the planet; I'm noticing that most everybody with whom I've spoken is already following some path or other and really they don't have time or energy to contribute to other projects. If we were to create something like a "sensemaking forge" and, perhaps, attract some funds that would support, say, a competitive analysis and exercise of many of these projects, perhaps we would begin the process of sensemaking the sensemaking industry. Just a thought. Your mileage might vary.