Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems

May 2008 Blog Posts (19)

Fork in the road for social media

From the readwrite web blog:

"Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 29, 2008 at 16:20 — 5 Comments

Bringing order to online discussions about climate change

A nice introduction to the MIT+Naples activity in Nature...

Bringing order to online discussions about climate change

Added by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 29, 2008 at 15:24 — 3 Comments

Tuning back in...

Having been in hospital for a week in Seattle, and then finding myself "deactivated" by Ning, I'm finally back, and trying to catch up! :-)

Added by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 27, 2008 at 23:11 — 2 Comments

Dashboards

A dashboard, in Web parlance, could be an entire portal or just some widget on any page. The purpose of a dashboard is to provide contextually related information, something like "just-in-time" information. One of the Google ads on this website happens to provide a nifty dashboard, albeit useful only in the U.S. It's a map of the states that responds to clicks on various states. A click gets you a display of the percentages of that… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 24, 2008 at 16:00 — No Comments

Insight from a stroke

I believe there exists an important relationship between the message in this TED video and global sensemaking activities.

Added by Jack Park on May 23, 2008 at 18:21 — 3 Comments

Seasteading: Ocean Colonies

Wired has an article related to seasteading, complete with a link to an online 300-page book on the subject. A quick glance at the book suggests it might be organized in such a fashion that it could be the target of issue mapping exercises from which a number of important issues related to the larger global sensemaking… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 22, 2008 at 15:57 — 13 Comments

Working environment for virtual teams

I'll report on the Motu project here. I discovered it while searching for open source TreeMap projects. Found one here, and it's used in the Motu project. Here's what the Motu site says (I wish the blockquote tag would work):

"The Motu system allows a virtual team to share data supporting in the mean time awareness. It appears to be a tool such as BSCW, TeamScope or SourceForge. It includes an… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 22, 2008 at 0:45 — No Comments

Footprint Calculator

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=calculator

"Global Footprint Network is pleased to announce a new Ecological Footprint Calculator! Currently we have calculators available for the U.S. and Australia, with more countries being added all the time. Click on one of these countries below to help see how your living habits relate to your use of the planet's resources."

Adding a bit more:… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 14, 2008 at 21:00 — No Comments

Grist for dialogs

Take a look at
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/only-greentech.html
and
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/confront-climat.html

Added by Jack Park on May 11, 2008 at 20:00 — No Comments

Collaboration and virtual worlds

A comment at the end of this business week article pointed to this page. The comment said "Cardinal Rule: Process precedes technology."

Added by Jack Park on May 11, 2008 at 17:19 — 4 Comments

What shall we call ourselves? The Result...

Many thanks to everyone who voted over the last 48 hours—and particularly to Mark Szpakowski who suggested the two names that topped our first poll.

The result of the second poll was a follows:

Mindful of the votes over the last 48 hours for various other names, I suggest that we regard ourselves as being ever open to the possibility of a further name change; if and when the perfect name emerges.

But for now,… Continue

Added by David Price on May 11, 2008 at 0:30 — 3 Comments

Entity Name System

Bernard Vatant posted this link at twine.com. It's a link to a pdf about OKKAM, the equivalent of a topic map that lets you look up URIs of things. It makes the same points I have been making about the use of URIs as identifiers (aka "names") for things: there is no central way at present to either control the distribution of URIs (anybody can make them up as needed, thus the potential to have the same… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 10, 2008 at 15:05 — No Comments

Compendium as a sensemaking hub for emergency response

This movie shows how Compendium was embedded in a semantic web infrastructure for emergency response (to an aircrash rather than a climatic disaster, but use your imagination!), with a variety of tools feeding event data (like a climate computer model might) into Compendium, which served as the sensemaking 'glue'.

http://www.e-response.org/demo/movie

from:

The Application of Advanced Knowledge Technologies… Continue

Added by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 10, 2008 at 9:00 — 1 Comment

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This periodic table maps the variety of visualization methods, with examples over each as your mouse flies over.

Added by Mark Szpakowski on May 9, 2008 at 20:44 — 2 Comments

NEW VOTE: What shall we call ourselves? [Deadline 10th May 11:59 pm GMT]

UPDATE:

In the best traditions of the Democratic Party, the longlist of names suggested on the Forum resulted in a wide distribution of votes and no clear endorsement across the group (see chart below).

To help clarify the signal, I suggest that we vote again today on the following poll:

Quizzes by…

Continue

Added by David Price on May 9, 2008 at 8:30 — 12 Comments

DebateWise: another for/against wikipedia-style site

DebateWise looks uncannily like Debatepedia, simply pooling arguments for and against a particular motion. But good to see another effort to promote debate, and a handy source of material that we can hopefully add better structure to with our tools.

Added by Simon Buckingham Shum on May 8, 2008 at 21:33 — 1 Comment

Yochai Benkler talk online

"Cooperation, Human Systems Design, and Peer Production" is in a teleconference starting now at ontolog. Slides are online now. mp3 of the talk will be available later.

Added by Jack Park on May 8, 2008 at 18:26 — No Comments

Visual Conversations

Bill Daul sent this message to his NextNow tribe:

Howard Rheingold twitted this item. It looks like a potentially great tool (or at least completely different) to use in a variety of potential ways...check it out!

http://www.tiil.us/seesmic/

Here is a sample conversation where "visual conversation" norms are discussed. http://www.tiil.us/seesmic/norms/ Click on any… Continue

Added by Jack Park on May 8, 2008 at 15:17 — 3 Comments

Conference call follow-up activities...

Mark Aakhus has created three excerpts from Jeff's conference call map (which I have uploaded as images in the photos section of the Ning site), all of which are available to edit and view via the HC4D Citrix Compendium site. The three excerpts cover:

> Group Direction

> Next Steps

> Jeff's "200-experts" thought experiment

There are also three suggested action points arising for all members of the group:

(1) Log-on to the Citrix… Continue

Added by David Price on May 6, 2008 at 19:00 — No Comments