Tag: climate-change

KMi supports Global Climate Change Situation Room

Last December, I reported the launch of the Millennium Project’s Global Climate Change Situation Room (GCCSR). Work has been progressing with this, and they’ve just released a screencast previewing some of the tools that will contribute to the collective intelligence platform they’re building:

Currently, this has the feel of many news aggregator services, but there is an intruiging looking set of red-amber-green dashboard indicators – it would be interesting to learn more of what sits behind them in terms of data fusion and analytics, and the sensemaking practices that emerge around their use by the domain experts who form a key part of the GCCSR concept.

On the knowledge integration/CI front, our research is concerned with Contested Collective Intelligence, which is germane to a domain such as this. Jack Park, a doctoral candidate in KMi’s Hypermedia Discourse group, is investigating the potential of adding hypermedia discourse support to GCCSR, and if this develops, we look forward to reporting more fully as they go on stream [meantime, for background to his work see his recent research report].

Global Climate Change Situation Room

CC-SitRmAnnounced today, with intruiging potential for testing collective intelligence concepts in science and policy, with structured deliberation around issue/argument maps being one of the elements…

What? Global Climate Change Situation Room

Where? Gimcheon, Republic of Korea

How? Global Collective Intelligence System

Who? Created by The Millennium Project

When? Initial development has begun

Funding? Gimcheon, Republic of Korea

Contact: Jerome Glenn at jglenn@igc.org

Background:

This situation room will be developed by a pioneering collective intelligence system that is creating new software, user interfaces, and software linkages that will connect networks of outstanding experts around the world. The initial expert groups being formed now are: climate science, energy, green technology, adaptation, mitigation, and integration of sustainable development and climate change. Mohan Munasinghe, Vice Chair of the IPCC, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize is the advisory chair for climate science and Paul Werbos, US National Science Foundation on loan to the US Senate is the advisory chair for Energy.

We define collective intelligence as “an emergent property from synergies among data/info/knowledge, software/hardware, and experts that continually learns from feedback to produce (nearly) just-in-time knowledge for better decisions than these elements acting alone.” An example of a collective intelligence for energy is the GENIS model as described at http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/GENIS.pdf. This is being adapted and expanded to serve the Global Climate Change Situation Room.

The situation room will be available via the Internet as a global resource to help the United Nations, governments, business, NGOs, and individuals understand the global situation and future prospects for climate change.

ESSENCE workshop podcasts

Just a note to say the podcasts from our ESSENCE project workshop are now up, allowing you to watch some of the leaders in the field of online argumentation and deliberation present updates of their work and demo their systems… Jack Park, David Price, Mark Klein, Luca Iandoli, Aldo de Moor and Anna De Liddo

essence-podcasts

Debate Mapping the Climate Sceptics

A lot of our argument visualization research is focused now on Climate Change. Here’s an example, thanks to the work that Anna De Liddo is doing on the our Collective Intelligence project. The BBC journalist Richard Black wrote an introductory piece on climate sceptics:

What do “climate sceptics” believe?

You might think that you know the answer, having heard, seen and read numerous counter-blasts aimed at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the course of this year, as the three components of its landmark climate assessment were published.

Despite having reported on climate change for more than a decade, I realised at the beginning of the year that I was not entirely sure.

[…] So I decided I had better try to find out.

The result was a summary of the “Top 10” arguments, and possible responses, which we have re-rendered in the Cohere knowledge mapping tool, to make clearer than prose can show what are the key relationships (supporting or challenging) between the different claims in the debate. (Once you’re logged in, you can then add new connections to support/challenge or link to new web resources backing a given contribution.)

[You’ll need Java to view this one] Here’s an embedded “ConnectionNet” applet providing a porthole view into the debate space — a self-organising graph of the whole debate map.

Click on the lower green View in context button to view either of the following maps properly, within Cohere:

Below is an alternative view we call the “Network Neighborhood”, showing a focal Idea with the incoming and outgoing connections one level deep. This provides a different, more structured way to step through the moves in the debate — clicking in an Idea moves it into the central focal point, updating the incoming/outgoing connections:

See also Mapping the Gaza Crisis for the great work our colleagues are doing with Debategraph…

Hypermedia Discourse in the “State of the Future” report

The State of the Future 2008 report is out now from the World Federation of UN Associations Millennium Project, with an updated analysis of the 15 global challenges that its worldwide panel have been analysing for 12 years now.

The Independent summarised it quite helpfully recently. This analysis and evidence-base will undoubtedly be feeding into our ESSENCE experiment.

Of particular interest from our Hypermedia Discourse perspective is Chapter 6: Global Energy Collective Intelligence. Jerry Glenn, the Millennium Project Director, lays out the case for a distributed, collective intelligence network focused on a specific challenge (energy), which includes structured, graphical deliberation tools.

The Chapter 6 appendix (on the CD accompanying the report) provides interface mockups, including this Compendium aerial view by Jeff Conklin.

So, it’s an exciting development to see these ideas that we’ve been working on for so long now gaining traction, and we’re now looking for the resources to develop Phase 2, as proposed in the report.

Evidence-Based Dialogue Mapping for Teenagers

KMi’s Compendium tool supports rapid visual mapping of dialogues and debates through a mix of visual language, tagging and hypermedia structuring. With a track record of use in the workplace, we are now beginning to build evidence of its potential for critical thinking in schools.

With >40,000 downloads and an annual workshop, KMi supports an active Compendium user community (and a growing developer group). It has found application primarily, although not exclusively, in the workplace, the tool of choice for many information analysts and facilitators of collective sensemaking. But could we demonstrate that younger users would embrace its visual language and the extra rigour of thinking that argument mapping requires?

In an exciting workshop led by Ale Okada, a Research Fellow in the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, teenagers judged by their schools to be “gifted and talented” attended a science summer school, and were taught how to map and structure their reasoning about the impact of climate change on the UK. The results are summarised in a new article, and represent the first step in our programme to introduce the next generation to visual, network-centric thinking, a literacy that we think will become increasingly important.

Okada, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a Research Tool to Investigate the Quality of School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation, International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 31(3), pp. 291–315 (Special Issue: Coffin, C. and O’Halloran, K.A, (Eds.) Researching Argumentation in Educational Contexts: New Methods, New Directions). Article PrePrint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/11773

Global Sensemaking network launches

I’m delighted to say that the Global Sensemaking network has just gone public, after several months of community building under the radar.

“Global Sensemaking (GSm) is a group of people dedicated to helping humanity address complex, interrelated global problems-such as climate change, energy policy, poverty, and food security-by developing and applying new web-based technology to assist collaborative decision making and cooperative problem solving.

We are from all walks of life: professors, scientists, software engineers, politicians, parents, grandparents, public health professionals, business people, students, film-makers, …. If our charter (below) appeals to you, please join us.”

This network is an exciting convergence of work at KMi in the Hypermedia Discourse group, with leading practitioner/researchers including MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, DebateGraph, Cognexus Institute, and many other highly motivated people committed to bringing next generation deliberation tools and group coordination to the challenges of climate change.

We invite you to join this effort to build critical mass, refine our mission, consolidate community structure, and integrate our tools. We welcome human-centred technologists, climate change subject matter experts, and policy/decision-makers.

Global Sensemaking was catalysed in part by a proposal I made for “HC4D: Human-Centred Computing for Climate Change Deliberation”

HC4D: Human-Centred Computing for Climate Change Deliberation

I’ve just created a page around the theme of Human-Centred Computing for Climate Change Deliberation:

“What socio-technical infrastructure will enable diverse stakeholders to contribute, and contest in principled ways, their views on climate change issues?

How can it be both usable and powerful, providing useful services (e.g. visualizations, summaries, alerts, connections and analyses of the debate) for different stakeholders?

Take a look, get in touch, and spread the word!