Tag: Global Warming

Mapping the IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change

by David

This Sunday I’ll be live mapping the debates at the marvellous IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

iq2GreenFestival

The festival, for which tickets are still available, has assembled a fascinating group of climate change speakers, including: Professor Mohan Munasinghe, Sir David King, Stanley Johnson, Professor Chris Rapley, Joan Ruddock, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Mark Woodall, Tony Juniper, Fiona Harvey, David Bellamy, Malini Mehra, Christine Loh, Isabel Hilton, Jonathon Counsell, Steve Koonin, Jeremy Leggett, Tom Burke, Ed Crooks, Michael Keating, and Oliver Tickell.

The full schedule encompasses a mixture of debates, seminars, and panel discussions, including: Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, Countdown to Armageddon – how long have we got?, Can Asia go green? Can technological innovation save us from disaster?, Green Herrings – what we need and needn’t bother doing, Biofuels – essential or a waste of time, UK political parties aren’t serious about climate change, Green Capitalists – a contradiction in terms?, Geoengineering – is it the silver bullet? Renewables – wind, solar & other – are they worth the bother?, and Bioperversity: An obituary for the world’s rainforests and other major ecosystems?

I’ll be aiming to map as many of points being made by the speakers on the day, and building on the initial seed maps over the subsequent days—and you’ll be able to follow the maps developing online on the IQ2 Green Festival website and on the Debategraph home page.

The current work in progress on the existing climate change map is shown below:

Feel free contribute to the debate maps from afar as they are developing, and if you are planning to attend the event with a laptop, join in and we can use the maps as an intelligent, multi-dimensional conference back channel.

I’m delighted to report as well that Anna De Liddo will be joining me to map the debates, and that Anna and I will be using the maps as one of the first building block in this year’s ESSENCE Collective Intelligence project on Climate Change in the build up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year.

Many thanks to Edie Lush and her team for conceiving and organizing the festival—and if you are planning to attend, don’t forget to say hello!

Introducing ESSENCE 2009…

by David
ESSENCE is the world’s first global climate collective intelligence event—designed to bring together scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers, and the emerging set of web-based sensemaking tools, to pool and deepen our understanding of the issues and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The event, starts online in January 2009 and culminates with the UN Climate Change Conference at the end of this year.

During the pre-launch phase, we are beginning to identify and assemble teams of scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers to work with the tool developers on specific aspects of the complex set of issues around climate change.

The aim is to develop a comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, that will be available for all to explore and enrich across the web.

The project is founded on principles of openness, transparency, and discovery; with no preconceptions about the conclusions that will emerge from the event.

If you are scientist, industrialist, campaigner, policy maker, tool maker—or someone with other ideas and resources to contribute—and are interested in learning more about and participating in ESSENCE, please get in touch.

Ready?… / …Engage

Essence Sponsors:

                   

 

Essence Partners:

        

 

 

 

 

Thinking about changing the world?

by David

A week in which: Dan Pink, Al Gore’s former chief speechwriter, told Tim Ferriss…

“Ultimately speeches are about actions. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. That’s a high bar. But that’s what we should aspire to when audiences give us this privilege.”

…TED uploaded a video of Dan’s old boss putting that philosophy into practice…

…and Tom Lehrer, turning 80, reminded us how quickly time can pass while you are thinking about change:

Changing Climate: live blogging the Progressive Governance summit

by David

Congratulations (and a relaxing Sunday) to Simon Dickson and the Downing Street digital team, for their phenomenal work on Policy Network’s Progressive Governance summit this morning.

At short notice, they produced an impressive and engaging microsite built around a live video stream, live blogging and comments, and immediate access to the summit papers. It was a perfect illustration of how lightweight web technology can transform the public experience of political gatherings of this kind; simultaneously demystifying proceedings and adding new layers of understanding—both about the content of the summit and, as Ellee Seymour notes, about the participants.

It was a courageous decision by all concerned to innovate rapidly in this fashion; a decision fully justified by the outcome. More soon, please.

View the full set of summit images are available here: http://progov.pm.gov.uk/see/photos/

The summit—which drew together Michelle Bachelet Jeria, Helen Clark, Bill Clinton, Kemal Dervis, Robert Fico, Alfred Gusenbauer, Antonio Guterres, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Donald Kaberuka, Gediminas Kirkilas, John Agyekum Kufuor, Pascal Lamy, Peter Mandelson, Thabo Mbeki, Romano Prodi, Kevin Rudd, Javier Solana, Jens Stoltenberg, and Dominque Strauss-Kahn, as well as Gordon Brown—focused on globalisation, development, international institutions, and climate change, with practical calls to action on each theme summarised in the final communiqué.

I followed the session on climate change, and the accompanying paper by Nicholas Stern and Laurence Tubiana, Director-General of (IDDRI), with particular interest in the context of the climate change debate map that Debategraph is developing in collaboration with Mark Klein at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Watch this space too, for emerging details of a broader international collaborative initiative on climate change deliberation.

Our early work in progress on the climate change map is embedded below, and we expect the map to move to a fully mature and comprehensive analysis of the global policy debate by the summer.

Anyone interested in participating in this process is welcome to contact us via email at david [at] debategraph [dot] org.