Mapping Obama's Speech in Berlin

As announced on the Global Sensemaking blog, and building on Tim Bonnemann’s excellent Wordle and Mark Szpakowski’s suggestion, I produced a draft map of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin yesterday, which you can view and explore here.

The snapshot below displays the top layer of the map, and you are welcome to log-in and improve both the top layer and the underlying structure of the first draft.


As noted in the earlier post, the preparation of the first draft of the map emphasised the different senses, dimensions and saliencies of the speech that emerge via the different forms and interpretations: video, transcript, Wordle, and map. And, no doubt, others experiencing Obama’s speech first via TV news analysis, newspaper reports, David Frum, a photograph, or at the speech itself would take away different senses too.

To illustrate how it is possible to develop this kind of mapping analysis further live on the web already, I have started to weave together the map and the transcript of the speech using the Future of the Book’s marvellous CommentPress tool to enable directly addressable, granular access to the text of Barack Obama’s speech, linked to the relevant sections of the map (and vice versa)—with a video clip layered into the latter example for good measure as well.

The granular addressability is shown at the paragraph level in this example; however, CommentPress—which is being applied imaginatively to several public consultations in the UK—allows the user to define a deeper level of granularity, enabling a finer one-to-one correspondence between the source document and the map.

The hope embodied in this experiment is that in the build up to the Presidential election in November it might be possible exemplify the potential of the emerging web technologies to shift the modus of political debate (a degree or two) away from the calculated cacophony of ephemeral soundbites toward a more considered, constructive and cumulative conversation.

If you are willing to help in the pursuit of this goal—working on the transcripts, mapping and tying together the arguments, highlighting inconsistencies and areas of agreement, and holding the candidates transparently accountable to their words—please join us.

The Internet is a Brain

Sunny summer’s morning in Somerset, enjoying the juxtaposition of:

Popular Science’s revelation of the first wiring diagrams of the cerebral cortex:

Matthew Hurst’s brilliant blogosphere activation simulation / visualization from PdF2008:


.

And Jeff Stibel’s Harvard Business blog: The Internet is a Brain

Debategraph: the debate processor

Cross-posting last month’s guest blogging piece from Seb Schmoller’s excellent Fortnightly Mailing blog:

Question: What do you get if you cross a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging, and social bookmarking with an argument map?

Answer: Debategraph.org

I started to collaborate on Debategraph with, my co-founder, Peter Baldwin in 2005. It’s one of those delightfully unlikely collaborations that the Internet makes possible: I’m based in Somerset in the UK and Peter is based in the Blue Mountains in Australia. We discovered each other, across the net, because we had two things in common: a shared perception of a problem and a shared idea for a solution.

The perceived problem is that the way that we address and resolve complex and contentious issues in public life is broken—and it is broken at a time when it has never been more important for those systems to function effectively. This is not an original conclusion, and it’s one that others have discussed elsewhere at length, but it was a conclusion that flowed directly from our personal experience: in Peter’s case as a former minister of higher education and cabinet minister for social security in the Keating administration in Australia, and in my case as a former advisor to, amongst others, H.M. Treasury, DCMS, DTI, and Ofcom.

What really brought us together though was not the diagnosis but the perception of a potential solution. This perception was threefold, that:

  • contentious and complex debates can be mapped comprehensively so that all pertinent issues, positions, arguments, evidence, and scenarios are represented in a transparent and coherent visual structure;
  • the web can be used to externalise and open up this process to anyone interested in contributing to, rating, or simply exploring the map; and
  • mapping debates in this way would benefit individuals and society.

In essence, debate mapping involves three steps:

  1. breaking down the subject debated into meaningful parts;
  2. identifying the relationships between those parts; and,
  3. presenting the parts and their relationships visually.

To illustrate this:

The image above shows a small strand of a map beginning to explore the options open to the international community in response to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology. A policy option—zero domestic enrichment in return for offshore supply—is identified and an argument in support of this position suggested—that the option would defuse the international crisis without disrupting the existing nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

A large map is simply made up of many of these kinds of small combinations of thought boxes.

The contents of each box can be edited and rated over the web, and anyone can add new boxes (issues, arguments, and positions etc) to the map. Each box also has an underlying detailed display to which images, charts, tables, full-length essays, free form comments and links to external documents can be added. As well as forming part of the vertical tree structure, the boxes can be semantically linked to any other box in the same map or different map(s).

Collaborative editing of the maps across the web makes it possible for the collective knowledge and insights distributed across the entire community of interested participants to accumulate in the map. Anyone who spots a gap or a loose end in the map or who identifies a new option can add this to the map immediately for all to see. In this way, initial seed maps can evolve towards mature and comprehensive views of debates to which, at least temporally, no one has anything else to add.

So what are the benefits? To begin with, the maps augment our individual and collective ability to think through complex challenges, by helping us to overcome the cognitive constraints of short-term memory and group processes such as homophily. They allow us to apply our minds to the full set the arguments rather than a partial subset, and, by reasoning openly, help us to reason more rigorously. Early quantitative evidence of the benefits of argument mapping is beginning to be gathered in an educational context.

Second, the maps provide a way to systematise the dialogue and deliberation processes used in, for example, the Harvard Negotiation Project and citizen juries across society. Just as mediation creates a physical space in which a conflict can be explored and resolved, the debate maps provide an online context in which conflicting values and interests distributed across multiple stakeholders can be surfaced and addressed openly and in an explicitly reasoned way. There’s no presumption of underlying consensus, but methods of this kind can facilitate the discovery of unforeseen creative solutions if they are there to be found.

Third, the transparency and openness of the maps help to engender trust in the policy making process on the part not just of the participants but also the observing majority. The transparency also makes it harder for the debate to be spun for political, commercial or media effect—and, by making the reasoning behind decisions explicit, the maps also bring a degree of retrospective accountability and learning to the decision making process.

Fourth, as each idea, position, and argument only has to be stated once on the map, the process is highly time efficient in comparison to traditional consultation methods in which multiple documents from different sources end up rehashing many of the same arguments (all of which have to be written and read each time). Freeing people from writing and reading redundant material creates a cognitive surplus that can be focused on the substance of the debate.

So that’s the theory, where are we in practice?

Well, we are a long way down a long road. We piloted the software with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Royal Society of Arts last summer, and have also begun to apply the mapping approach to other domains—for example, exploring 50 years of academic debate on the prospects for artificial intelligence.

We launched Debategraph.org in the spring this year as a free, creative commons, social venture and are proud signatories to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration and enthusiastic participants in the Open Knowledge movement. The content on the site is growing steadily, and as more people become familiar with the mapping approach, our goal is for Debategraph to mature into a significant public resource: a global map of interrelated debates in which the best arguments on all sides of any contentious public issue are continuously available for all to see and for all to improve.

In the short term, we are embarking on an international project on climate change with various public and private sector partners, including the MIT and the Open University. And, in preparation for this, we have just released a new feature that lets you embed automatically updating snapshots of debates on blogs and websites (see the Iran map example below).

There’s much still to be done though: we’re in an early phase of our long-term development, with plenty of scope for refining and simplifying the user interface and for introducing different map visualisations, and there are significant social and cultural challenges ahead too. So if you are a natural pioneer, interested in experimenting with Debategraph in a field that matters to you and in helping to fulfill the nascent potential of this new category of tool, we would love to hear from you.

Streaming live from 2gether08

Thanks to Richard Jolly, here’s the live streaming feed from the wonderful 2gether08 conference. The full conference schedule is available here.

UPDATE: With the conference over for this year, here are a couple of video interviews recorded at the event by (the thankfully ubiquitous) David Wilcox:

(1) UK Minister for Transformational Government, and still prolific blogger, Tom Watson, on the announcement of Show Us a Better Way, a laudable and timely £20,000 public competition to find innovative ways of building on and mashing up Government data:

(2) An impromptu interview between Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, and Benjamin Cohen, Channel 4’s technology correspondent, on Umair’s inspiring manifesto for the next industrial revolution:

Public Service Broadcasters in the Digital Age

Two quick reminders for anyone thinking about the reformation of public service broadcasting in the UK:

(1) The closing date for responding to Phase 1 of Ofcom’s PSB Review is Thursday 19th June. You can read further details here and here about the Review which was launched in April by Ofcom’s Chief Executive Ed Richards.

Ofcom and Tom Loosemore, in particular, are to be congratulated for bringing the consultation process into the blogosphere, and for experimenting with the CommentOnThis / CommentPress approach to allow readers to comment directly on each paragraph in the PSB Review’s interactive Executive Summary.

I love the simplicity of the CommentOnThis and CommentPress approach, which is clearly motivated by similar urge to transparency and read/write participation as Debategraph.

The document-centric approach of CommentOnThis / CommentPress also makes it comparatively simple to enable public participation once the initial time, energy and resources has been expended on creating the original consultation documents.

Debategraph takes a more radical, subject-oriented approach to the same challenge, which if followed to its logical conclusion could (we think) significantly reduce the overall time spent by the consulting body and its stakeholders on the consultation process.

Instead of creating a long consultation document at the outset, the consultation team could start building a public debate map of the consultation issues, and invite the stakeholders to join them in this process—decomposing the subject matter into the individual issue, positions, arguments, evidence and scenarios, and allowing the stakeholders as well as the consultation team to edit, rate, challenge or support the individual arguments.

To give a sense of how this process might work I have produced a seed map of some of the arguments live Ofcom’s interactive summary executive summary (below).

As each element on the map is also its own wiki-page it’s easy to layer in longer commentaries (up to 50,000 words), images, tables, and charts etc as the map builds towards maturity. And as the core, hierarchical structure of the map is similar to the hierarchical outline of a standard report, it’s relatively straightforward at the end of the consultation period to automatically generate the basis of a final report directly from map—with the a key difference being that everyone’s contributions are already represented in the report.

In this way, rather than having multiple people create multiple documents that redundantly repeat many of the same arguments (each of which has to be written and read multiple times), everyone can focus collaboratively and directly on the issues at hand and ensure that all pertinent considerations and all voices are represented fairly on the map. Visualising and exploring the issues and arguments in this way also enhances transparency and trust in the consultation process and helps to ensure that every issues is surfaced and addressed comprehensively.

As well as potentially reducing the cycle time of the consultation process, the debate map could save further time and resources when the next consultation round on the topic begins; as many of the relevant arguments will already be in place on the map and will not need to be recreated from scratch. Indeed, once created, the debate map can be updated over time by the different stakeholders as new arguments, evidence and scenarios emerge; providing a continuously evolving view of the subject; so that when the next formal consultation process begins the majority of the thinking and work involved may have been accomplished on the map already.

(2) The second PSB reminder is that TechCrunch and the BBC are holding a debate at Broadcasting House on 25th June to discuss the issues around the BBC’s assets and technology prompted by the debates here and here.

The debate will be chaired by Steve Bowbrick, with an impressive list of speakers:

* Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet.

* James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

* Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, BBC new media.

* Azeem Azhar, startups angel investor, ex-BBC, proposer of the BBC Public License.

* Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch UK.

Web startups and developers are encouraged to attend, with tickets available here. And for anyone interested in exploring the debate in detail in advance or afterwards I have seeded a debate map here:

Wordle up

Jonathan Feinberg has created Wordle a delightful tool for making and sharing beautiful word clouds (see the Debategraph illustration below).

Debategraph visualised in Wordle

Click here for the full size version.

As with other word and tag clouds, the frequency with which words appear in a submited text determines their scale in the cloud; however, Wordle builds on this by offering a range of formatting options and exploiting the space within words and letters to give a more organic feel to the resulting clouds.

Hat Tip: the ever inspiring Lloyd Shepherd.

Debate Mapping Obama's VP choice…

In the wonderful way of the web, a generous invitation from Seb Schmoller to guest blog an overview post about Debategraph, led to encouraging and deeply insightful feedback from David Weinberger about Debategraph.

In a subsequent post, David called for transparent debate about Barack Obama’s choice of vice-presidential running mate, noting that:

Obama

“Barack Obama has promised to tear down the stone wall and dense bushes with which the current administration has barricaded the White House. Good. Democracy without transparency is at best assumed.

And, Obama has promised to take advantage of our new connective technology — the Internets and all its associated tubeware — to enable a level of citizen participation undreamed of since our population outgrew the local town hall.

So, how about if the campaign starts now by opening up the vice presidential selection process?”

…so here’s a debate map featuring some of the mooted VP candidates and the arguments for and against their candidacy. Anyone can add new candidates and new arguments. Anyone can rate the candidates and the arguments for and against. And anyone can embed this (automatically updating) map of the debate on their blog; so that changes made anywhere will be displayed everywhere.

Which is about as transparent as it gets.

Help us share the debate as widely as possible, and let’s find out what the collective and connective wisdom of the web makes of Obama’s potential running mates

News Junkie, Cold Turkey

Ceased to be?

Rachel Carson or Monty Python?

Dead or merely resting?*

While the blogosphere ponders the implications of Twitter’s latest Silent Spring, it has been nervous week for twitchers everywhere.

While “Twitter’s down” is starting to develop the inane and comic familiarity of a catchphrase, “Amazon’s down” sounds like a global cataclysm.

No Flow...

Still, there’s always the TV News, isn’t there?

Being wired’s no fun when there’s nothing coming down the wires—and while the absence of Twitter, Amazon, and the TV news might be survivable, I’m not sure that my nervous system could cope with this:

No news is frankly disturbing...

Thank heavens for Dave Winer’s News Junk….

*Resting (and expecting big things to follow).

ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

Thanks to David Osimo’s highly recommended blog on eGovernment 2.0, I was in Brussels at the end of last month to present our work-in-progress on Debategraph to the European Commission’s ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling Consultation Workshop Framework Programme VII.

It was a fascinating day, exploring the Information Society Directorate’s long-term research agenda in this field, against a background, outlined by David Broster Head of Unit for eGovernment and CIP Operations, of the movement of web 2.0 tools from the social and professional domain into the political and policy domains (see slide below).

ICT for Participative eGoverance

Among the many excellent and thought-provoking presentations to the workshop, Anthony D. Williams’s (co-author of Wikinomics) on Wikinomics and the Future of Government and Governance, and Andy Mulholland (Global CTO of Cap Gemini) on From National Citizen to Web Citizen, had a particularly powerful resonance from my perspective.

The full set of presentations is available here.

The cluster of institutions working on interrelated projects and arriving at similar conclusions from different angles signalled strong validation for the approach that we are implementing and the goals that we are pursuing, and the enthusiasm with which Debategraph was greeted on the day was tremendously encouraging and much appreciated.

The next big event on the calendar, in Lyon, 25-27 November 2008, is highly recommended to everyone with an interest in eGovernance and eParticipation in Europe.

Government 2.0 – only connect…

“Only connect… Live in fragments no longer.” E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910).

Government 2.0?

The lightweight, collaborative, multiway technologies emerging across the web, and the new patterns of social interaction associated with them, are about to transform the shape of government, our experience of government, and our participation in government. To misquote Clay Shirky: government that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

But what kinds of government will emerge from this process?

Paul Johnston and the Connected Republic team have been thinking deeply about this, and today published Seven Principles of Government 2.0 that articulate their sense of the ways in which things may be different.

Their suggested principles are:

  1. A less Hierarchical Public Sector: Government 2.0 will have moved away from command and control, devolving much more decision-making to local units and frontline staff.
  2. A Collaborative, Joined-up Public Sector: Government 2.0 will offer a more joined-up face to citizens and will use collaborative models and tools to break down silo barriers, maximise the use of precious resources and dramatically reduce process time cycles.
  3. A Public Purpose Sector: The boundaries of Government 2.0 will be wider and more flexible, enabling creation of public value by a ‘public purpose’ sector which will be much broader and more diverse than the traditional public sector.
  4. Empowered Citizens: Government 2.0 will enable citizens to do more for themselves, either individually or collectively, as co-producers of services and shapers of public policies.
  5. A Feedback-driven Public Sector: Government 2.0 will be radically closer to citizens and will give multiple and real opportunities for feedback, and will ensure the feedback has a real impact in shaping its decisions.
  6. Open and Transparent Government: Government 2.0 will be radically more open and transparent than current models in relation to policy making, service delivery, internal administration and accountability processes.
  7. Facilitative Government: Government 2.0 will see government’s role shift much more towards creating context, orchestrating and facilitating, rather than controlling and delivering, public discourse and service delivery.

In keeping with the spirit of the analysis, the principles are open for discussion on a new wiki on the Connected Republic site.

On your way over to wiki, you might also like to glance at: Personal Democracy Forum 2008: Rebooting the System, From Wikinomics to Government 2.0 (via Don Tapscott), How Web 2.0 can Reinvent Government, and Liza Sabater’s The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics.