WAVE - Welcoming Argument Visualisation to Europe

Project WAVE aims to improve the inclusiveness and transparency of EU decision making at the national and European level by using highly integrated, state-of-the-art Argument Visualisation techniques to make the impact of complex EU environmental legislation on climate change more accessible and easy to understand for citizens, special interest groups and decision makers alike.
WAVE will deploy Debategraph (www.debategraph.org), an innovative argument visualisation platform, in a multi-lingual, cross border context. WAVE will target cross-border discussions on drafted and implemented legislation so as to facilitate the understanding of the proposed and implemented legislation impact. WAVE will feed back its results to MEPs and MPs that have affiliated with the project in order to ultimately join up with and inform at least three governments – the national governments of the three trial sites – UK, France and Lithuania. Uniquely, Debategraph will not only enable citizens and decision makers with differing points of view to more easily comprehend complex environmental debates; it will also empower them. Moreover, rather than merely visualising the results of individual debates, the WAVE project will depict the relationships between competing argument strands – a factor which is crucial to developing a full understanding of complex, inter-related issues, but which has only now become possible through the use of latest generation web technology.
 

The main objectives of WAVE are:

• Engage a broad range of citizens in trials and test the effectiveness of argument visualization tools in helping citizens from a variety of countries and demographics to better understand complex issues generally
•  Measure whether and under what conditions these tools can have specific impact on one of the most important and popular legislative agendas facing Europe (environment).