Tag: Debatemapper

Debate Maps, Public Policy, Openness and Trust

by David

Paul Johnston wrote a characteristically thoughtful and constructive post last month on the need for public authorities to open up debates on public issues to genuine citizen engagement and influence.

Prior to the post, Paul and William Heath catalysed a debate map on the government’s plans for a new Identity System in the UK; a snapshot of which is shown below. Reflecting on the process, Paul provided an excellent précis of our public policy objectives for Debategraph:

“David believes that as more experts engage with the map, its quality and accuracy will steadily improve, so that even newcomers to the debate will quickly be able to see what parts of the debate are most important and where the real differences lie. The tool anyway has a capacity for people to rate elements of the argument, so there is also scope in this way for the wisdom of the crowds to shape the debate. So for David (if I have understood him correctly) the key issue is to go beyond the superficial yes vs. no of much political debate and provide a map that really captures an argument in all its complexity and sophistication. For him (I think) a map needs to be fairly detailed if it is to be genuinely enlightening and so make a real contribution. And Web 2.0 enables this because a wide range of true experts can engage and so allow the real substance of an argument to emerge.”

It’s a lucid summary, to which I would add:

(1) Debate maps aim to capture succinctly and in context every argument that anyone thinks is pertinent to a debate. The complexity of a map mirrors the complexity of the relevant issues as perceived by the community of mappers. Simple issues produce simple maps: complex issue produce complex maps.

(2) Many of the issues that we face in the 21st Century are intrinsically complex. And we can either ignore or deny this complexity and hope for the best, or seek to understand and deal with it. Debate maps give us a means to understand this complexity by letting us to capture and explore it at our own pace.

(3) Debate maps strip away the extrinsic complexity of public debates—the cacophony of partial arguments repeated in ever-louder voices—that can bedevil attempts to deal with the underlying complexity of a debate. Once an argument is represented on a debate map, people can focus on improving and responding to it rather than repeating it.

(4) Debate maps grow to maturity through iterative community interaction: capturing, responding to, clarifying, distilling, rating and reorganising the arguments into as rigorous, concise and comprehensive a structure as possible. Expert input is a vital part of this process, but, from the perspective of the map, the definition of an expert is simply anyone who has something novel and pertinent to add to the debate.

In his post Paul proceeds to outline a 5-stage template model that he suggests could be applied to complex political debates to help participants to get to the essence of the debate and of the different views within the debate. It’s a stimulating proposal that merits detailed reflection. From my perspective, the distillation and clarity that Paul is quite rightly striving for here, will naturally occur with maturing debate maps; as the focus of activity shifts from gathering and articulating the arguments and options to sifting and choosing from the arguments and options.

A further characteristic of debate maps is that they provide open spaces in which debates can evolve to find their own form, as new issues and options emerge. Hence, the boundaries of debate maps are not fixed by government-centric frames—a potential concern Martin Stewart-Weeks raises with respect to the templates—but are discovered and defined by the participants in the process of building the map. This is important because, as Martin notes:

“Part of the citizen engagement debate is about expanding the capacity for people and organisations to not only be the ones being consulted about the government’s agenda, but to be able to determine, at least to some extent, what the agenda should be in the first place.”

The open process of exploration on a map also frees participants from the need to adopt and defend fixed positions in the debate from the outset; keeping open the possibility that previously hidden but ultimately more attractive options will be identified. It also reduces the risk of premature distillation of the issues into a superficially attractive but fundamentally flawed policy position.

The belated publication this month of the Crosby report—which reframes the ID debate in an imaginative and potentially generative way—highlights the structural weaknesses of the current policy making process. An initial exploratory mapping process might have brought the arguments the report makes to the surface of the debate sooner. Conjecture, perhaps, but there are few less visible places for an argument to reside than in a drawer in Whitehall.

The transparency and openness to arguments from all sides that debate maps embody and encourage are surely vital components of any serious project to rebuild public trust in the policy making process. An issue that William Heath reflects on elsewhere.

And the transparency works both ways; as debate maps bring the trade-offs involved in political choices into sharper focus for the people making the policy demands as well as those making the decisions. And constructive engagement with these trade-offs is essential on both sides of the decision, as Matthew Taylor has argued eloquently at length.

Debate maps aren’t predicated on an assumption of underlying consensus—although if consensus is there to be found they will assist in its discovery—and debate maps don’t remove the burden of contentious decisions from Government. They merely strive to ensure that those contentious decisions are made in full cognisance of all the arguments that the community can muster, and that the Government provides an open and clear rationale for its decision in the context of those arguments.

As Paul notes in closing his post:

“Anyway, I think this is a really interesting field and I would love to see some public authorities embracing it and experimenting!”

From Debatemapper to the Debategraph…

by David

An exciting time for us, with long-planned changes now live on the site—and the culmination of our first developmental phase, which began last summer with the pilot projects for the UK Prime Minister’s Office and the Royal Society for Arts.

The changes highlight both our social purpose—of building a global repository of public debate that’s freely available for all to see and for all to improve—and our vision of mapping not just individual debates but the cumulative graph of semantically interrelated debates.

There’s much for future discussion, but for now the main points are:

(1) A new name and URL to embody our public ethos and intent: www.debategraph.org.

Debategraph logo

(2) The adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license—the Creative Commons license closest in spirit to the Wikipedia GFDL license—for all material posted to the site henceforth. The license is the emerging standard for mass collaboration projects of this kind; as signalled by the recent announcements from Creative Commons, Wikipedia and Citizendium.

Creative Commons License

(3) The capability to interrelate and navigate through a cloud of semantically related debates—to see more clearly how debates shape, and are shaped by, each other—is now fully enabled within Debategraph.

Navigating through clouds of debate

Lots accomplished: and, as ever, lots still to do; with all feedback welcomed wholeheartedly.

…and come and join us at the start of a great adventure.

Rethinking Drugs Policy

by David

Following the publication of the report by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy earlier this year, the Debatemapper team worked with the RSA to create a debate map of the case made in the report for rethinking UK drugs policy.

The map decomposes the report’s arguments into constituent elements, each of which is open to further refinement, challenge, comment and evaluation. You can see the top level structure of the map in the debate strand below.

The Commission’s report is intended to feed into the UK Government’s 2008 review of the National Drugs Strategy; for which a formal public consultation process is underway. You can read more about the RSA’s other initiatives in this context here.

The debate map is now open to editing, comment and evaluation by anyone with an interest in the drugs policy field, and we hope that over time a community of experts will form around the map to cultivate it as a permanent resource for drugs policy stakeholders in the UK and beyond.

With the wider international debate in mind – and to illustrate how Debatemapper can be used to build clusters of interrelated maps – we have also created a new map from an existing strand of the RSA debate map, which explores the arguments for and against the legalisation of drugs.

The top-level arguments are shown in the strand below. Like a wiki, the debate map is inherently provisional and open to further refinement. So if you spot any gaps or weaknesses in the arguments or if you have any new lines of thought or evidence to contribute, please feel free to sign in and start editing and evaluating the map straightaway. Video and text help is available directly from the map.

Mapping the Prime Minister's Media Debate

by David

On 12 June 2007, just before he stepped down as UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair delivered a lecture about the state of the relationship between politics and the media.

Tony Blair's lecture at Reuters (Source: Reuters)

The Debatemapper team was invited by the Prime Minister’s Office to model the PM’s argument and the ensuing debate; with the structure and content of the debate map fully editable online by the lecture delegates and an invited group of e-democracy experts.

To the best of our knowledge(*), this is the first time in world politics that a live web-based, collaboratively editable debate map has been used in this way. And is further testimony to the pioneering spirit of the Downing Street digital communications team (notably Jimmy Leach, Neil Franklin and, formerly, Ben Wegg-Prosser).

During the mapping project we analysed the arguments presented in 102 media articles – ranging from Fox News to Media Lens – and included arguments advanced by, among others, Andrew Gilligan, Alastair Campbell, Paul Staines and Michael White.

As the Prime Minister anticipated in his speech, the dominant theme of the immediate commentary might be characterised as “look who’s talking”. Indeed, for a substantial proportion of the articles this was the only line of argument developed.

Strikingly, even the articles that engaged with the substance of the argument did so via relatively shallow and narrow reasoning; an observation on the quantity and diversity of the arguments offered in the individual articles (constrained, no doubt, by time and word count) rather than the quality of the arguments or, indeed, the arguer.

To a casual reader, it would be easy to view this surface impression as indicative of the systematic dysfunction identified in the speech. However, the surface impression is misleading in this case.

Although most of the articles made a small number of points, and a few points appeared in most of the articles, the complete set of arguments expressed across all the articles constituted a mature and reasoned response to the Prime Minister’s lecture and developed the debate significantly beyond the case he outlined.

The challenge in perceiving the underlying richness of the response is that the arguments are distributed thinly across the articles rather than concentrated in a few.

Debate mapping addresses this problem by collecting and organising the arguments into a single coherent structure, articulating each argument fairly and concisely, and filtering out the noise arising from repetition, rhetoric and digression.

In this way, editable online debate maps offer readers a comprehensive and highly distilled perspective on the arguments raised in a complex debate and a means to contribute directly to the structure of that debate; the trade-off is the structural discipline and learning-curve involved in building and exploring the maps, which will not be to everyone’s tastes.

The lecture debate map (which you can access via the “View live in context” button in the short debate strand below) helps us to see both how the collective media response expanded the debate beyond the argument outlined by the Prime Minister and, perhaps more significantly, how the analysis, both in the Prime Minister’s speech and in the media response, was heavily weighted towards the diagnosis of the perceived problem as opposed to its resolution.

While some commentators disputed the degree of the dysfunction in the relationship between politics and the media, and others emphasised a proper role for scepticism in the relationship, almost all acknowledged the existence of a troubling dysfunction.

Such systemic phenomena are difficult to break. So it has been encouraging in the last few weeks to see signs of willingness on both sides to explore potential ways forward.

It would be interesting too, reflecting on the observations above, to examine more thoroughly the extent to which the perception of a dysfunctional relationship between politics and the media is skewed by an eye-catching but misleading surface impression that obscures a richer and more mature relationship below. To the extent that this is the case, the foundation for change may be stronger than it first appears.

The current debate map was conceived as a time-limited experiment linked to the lecture, and ending with the Tony Blair’s departure from office on 27 June. The map is far from exhaustive, capturing only the arguments raised during this period, and, like a wiki, remains inherently provisional and open to further refinement. For anyone minded to use the map in such a way, it may well contain the seeds for a mediated solution to the underlying problem.

In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone who helped us with the project and gave us detailed feedback; the fruits of which are embodied in the latest release of Debatemapper, of which more later.

*If you know of any other examples, earlier or not, we would love to hear about them.