What shall we call ourselves? [New Deadline 23:59 PM GMT 10th May]

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 7, 2008 at 15:52

The concept of Appreciative Inquiry
http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/
was pointed out to me by Tom Munnecke sometime around 2003 or thereabouts. The notion of positive discourse, while certainly not common (but which might finally become more mainstream in American politics after yesterday's primaries) is of great interest to me. I prefer to find ways to frame points to be made based on room for improvements and not on enumeration of deficiencies. We shouldn't need to follow "scorched earth" tactics. Tom coined two terms: benegnosis and malgnosis in framing his discussions: http://www.munnecke.com/papers/dragons.htm
FWIW, I recommend Tom's paper.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Aakhus on May 7, 2008 at 16:13

Good point and this is not a trivial matter when it comes to the aims of this community and figuring out a name. There has been some work on this. I've struggled with this interesting cultural feature a lot as a key intellectual home for me is the field of argumentation research/theory.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Szpakowski on May 7, 2008 at 1:05

globalissues is taken.

earthissues is available.

globalsensemaking.net is available. I like that. (.com and .org also available)

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Permalink Reply by David Price on May 7, 2008 at 8:47

Thanks again for the suggestions Mark. I have added these to the collected list on the original post, which I will update throughout the day as more suggestions come in.

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Permalink Reply by Luca Iandoli on May 8, 2008 at 10:12

It would be interesting to open the discussion to other global topics, but I feel a need to focus in this (early) stage. My opinion is that we risk to have very fragmented and low scale discussions, at least at the beginning. and that other potential users will not find interesting to be involved since there is a lack of scale-related incentives. So my idea is: first, let's create the scale effect, then move to topic broadening. On the other hand the Climate topic has several advantages:

1) it is broad and interdisciplinary enough to involve many other topics ranging from oil peak to food riots (due to biofuels?)
2) it is really a hot topic which can attract the interest of many stakeholders, including scientists , citizens, policy makers, etc. but also journalists and other media (see how many wikipedia articles are quoted in the traditional newspaper, magazines, TV news ...)

So focus on Climate can probably help us more to reach faster a good scale
As for the name I like ClimateDebate because Debate is more generale, open and positive that Argument or Argument Mapping or Deliberation. We hope aour community will deliberate, but the primary objective is probably on Debate enhancement

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Permalink Reply by Mark Szpakowski on May 7, 2008 at 16:10

EarthCareTalk

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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 7, 2008 at 22:38

I'm partial to SystemScienceEarth simply because I'm partial to systems science! I think it is the latter that will help guide us toward understanding the complex interconnected issues that constitute the challenges to the planet.

George

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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 7, 2008 at 22:51

I should add that I think it will be systems science that will guide the discovery and design of solutions.

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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 8, 2008 at 3:54

A bit more clarification. In my own background researches on the topic of global warming (starting some eight years ago) I was led into questions of why some people were deniers that brought me back to cognitive science. I was led to peak oil since a big culprit in AGHG emissions is burning oil. I was led into coal. I was led into changes in the hydrologic cycle. I was led into population and ecological footprint... Well you get the idea. Moreover, each of these has causal fingers pointing back at the original problem that got me started. I just no longer think we can take a purely reductionist approach to one piece of what now looks like a global integrated set of wicked problems with feedback loops.

In the structured discourse system that I have been thinking a lot about (ConsensUs ) I found it seemed reasonable to choose a topic domain as broad as possible for complex systems. You can always ignore other (potential) branches of the topic tree as you drill down in one specific branch, but you have the option of massively parallel drill down in multiple branches where interactions (cross connections) might be needed to understand the problem further.

So while we might start out talking about climate change, I'm betting we'll be talking about fossil fuels at some point. For example when we get to discussing adaptation to climate we will be talking a lot about what needs to be done, like moving New York City inland, which will take a lot of energy. But where will the energy come from?

I guess it depends on what you feel comfortable tackling. What problem you believe you need to (and can) solve. But my own experience is that you start at one point in the complex web and find quickly that you are investigating many other points. Systems science provides a fair number of tools for investigating (and mapping) , which is why I suggest its reification.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 8, 2008 at 4:01

+1 particularly in relation to migrating away from reductionist approaches. They are important, but not the whole story.
Please take a moment to disambiguate "ConsensUs". It doesn't google well. Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by George E. Mobus on May 8, 2008 at 16:10

Sorry. I made the word a hotlink but it doesn't seem to show up as a different color or underlined! Maybe a patch to the parser!!

The explicit link is: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/ConsensUs.html

Warning: Not a white paper!

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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on May 9, 2008 at 18:06

George, I see that you have spoken on anticipatory systems. I happen to have strong opinions that suggest that what we are really trying to build in any sensemaking system is the equivalent of an anticipatory system, one that evolves a model of its environment that offers predictions as well as explanations. I think that Robert Rosen's book on that subject is an important read, albeit a bit hairy in the maths for most folks.

ConsensUs reminds me of a topic map combined with dialogue mapping. Are there any more recent papers or work on that project?

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