Hello, David. Please tell us a bit about yourself
I co-founded Debategraph with the former Australian cabinet minister Peter Baldwin in 2006, having previously worked as public policy advisor in the UK.
Peter and I came together with a shared understanding of the potential for collaborative argument visualization to strengthen the quality of public policy dialogue and deliberation in society.
We piloted Debategraph with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and Debategraph is currently being used by, among others, the White House and the Independent newspaper.
What are the main reasons we may want to use collaboratively editable maps?
Public policy debates tend to be highly complex—with multiple data sources and perspectives and conflicting demands and values, and a high noise-to-signal ratio—making it difficult to develop a comprehensive understanding of the essential arguments advanced by all sides.
Collaboratively editable and interactive visual maps offer a transparent, efficient and engaging way to draw together and weigh all of the relevant intelligence distributed through the community.
How does it work?
The maps bring together all of the salient ideas and evidence into a single, coherent, meaningful structure, formed from simple building blocks (policy issues, the potential policy options in response to these issues, and the arguments that support and oppose each option).
Each idea is represented once; in a form that is continuously and iteratively open to challenge, support and refinement by the community; with the iterative development allowing large-scale, multi-dimensional maps to evolve from the first simple seed question until every salient consideration and every perspective has been addressed.
Once an idea has been represented on the map there is no need for it to be repeated; instead the community is free to focus on improving, supporting, challenging and evaluating the idea—which means that, in principle, the process can work as well with millions participants as with a smaller closed group.
In online and offline discussions, we all have experienced with participants having fixed mindset. How does this type of mapping help?
Capturing every salient perspective on the map, and aiming to express each perspective as succinctly and fairly as possible, encourages participants to see and explore the problem space as a whole, to see their perspective, arguments and interests in the context of all the other perspectives, arguments and interests, and to appreciate the complexities and trade-offs involved.
In doing so, the maps help to counter the human tendencies toward homophily (mixing with like-minded people) and group polarization (the self-reinforcing movement towards extreme positions in groups of like-minded people) and to encourage a more open, exploratory and creative form of public conversation that encourages mutual listening and awareness and the discovery of new options.
Discussions are usually spread around the Web. What is your solution?
The collaboratively editable maps can be embedded on, and updated from, any number websites and blogs; with changes to a map made at any of the sites updating immediately across all of the sites. In this way, the maps can be displayed at the different locations on the web at which each of the different stakeholder groups tend to congregate naturally while at the same time enabling the conversation to flow back an forth between each location and each group. RSS feeds and email alerts are also available to keep everyone up to date remotely with changes as the map evolves.
Basically, how does it start?
The maps can start with an internal government team, an invited community of participants from within or outside government from, or be open to the entire community at the outset. The scale of the community and the degree of openness can expand or contract as the map evolves. All participants can be given the freedom to view, edit, build on, comment on and rate the ideas on the map, or be restricted to specifiable subsets of these options—and the process can be self-organizing or facilitated by moderators.
The maps can begin with a single question or be seeded with a range of initial issues and options, and the starting focus can be as broad (e.g. climate change policy) or as narrow (e.g. carbon trading) as desired.
Indeed, you are involved in WAVE, an eParticipation project using DebateGraph as a tool for … Climate Change. What is the current situation and what are the plans?
The preparatory work for WAVE project started earlier this year and its main public phase will be in the autumn, with three argument visualization projects running in Lithuania, France and the UK around climate change legislation feeding into national and cross-national maps. The Lithuanian, French and UK pilots are being coordinated by Kaunas University of Technology, Sophia Antipolis and 21c Consultancy respectively, with each team engaging with representatives of the national parliaments, stakeholder groups and the wider public.
What are the intended outcomes?
The project aims to contribute to the development and understanding of climate change legislation in Europe and to explore the utility and potential of collaborative argument visualization as a means of facilitating eParticipation.
Any limits to this innovative technology?
Online visual policy mapping is a new and emerging field, in which the technology is developing rapidly. For now at the least this means that the tools and the underlying idea and process of mapping will be novel to many of the participants, and involve new learning curves for first time contributors. Moreover, thinking deeply and constructively as a community in this way involves a higher degree of care, patience and a tolerance for ambiguity than many of us are habituated to on the web. Hence, in the short term, the mapping approach is likely to appeal most to people who have a strong intrinsic interest in either policy making or in the specific subject matter; although our experience with The Independent newspaper is demonstrating that the maps built in this way can reach out to larger scale audiences (with tens of thousands of readers each month).
Two very specific limitations are that (1) mapping is not the ideal medium for visually impaired people, and (2) some members of the population don’t have access to the web; so it’s important for mapping-based public consultations to provide alternate submission routes for any groups potentially disadvantaged in these or other ways.
Finally, while the maps help the community to identify and explore the emotional-, values-, and framing-based dimensions of public policy debate: they don’t remove these dimensions from the debate. They do, however, enable reason to speak as clearly as it can in those debates (on all sides of the debate).
Thank you, David. We'll certainly get back to you. Please keep us posted with the most interesting updates.
I certainly will!
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