To register your interest in ESSENCE, track news and discuss the concept, first thing we recommend is to sign up with your email to the forum:

[ESSENCE Google group homepage]

Following the workshop at KMi in May 2009, the immediate focus of the project is to build a single comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The early-stage map is being developed live in The Independent, as well as a growing number of sites – and work is underway to enable the content within the map to flow into the other participating tools (including the OU’s Cohere and MIT’s Deliberatorium).

You are invited join us in contributing more elements to the map, or to develop your own teams and initiatives around a particular climate challenge:

A Team
=
2 or more Participants who want to work together
+
A Challenge for analysis and debate
+
A Digital Deliberation Tool in which to conduct the dialogue
+
(optionally) Other Sensemaking Tools (eg. for data visualization; simulation)

Follow the links to the ESSENCE Wiki to see Participants, Challenges, Tools, and Teams for more information.

Who are You?

We invite you (Policymakers, Climate Scientists, Social Scientists, Journalists, Collaboration Technologists, Advocacy Groups…) to join this live internet experiment:

• Collaboration Technologists. You are developing a tool for online deliberation, or for analysing arguments, which you’d like to see put through its paces.
• Information Media Technologists. You are developing a tool for communicating the evidence underpinning a debate, eg. ‘infographics’/information visualization.
• Policymakers, Climate Scientists, Advocacy Groups, Concerned Members of the Public… You are interested in the role of computing in pooling expertise from diverse, online stakeholders, and in helping to build common ground where trust or common agendas may not yet exist. You may also be looking for new ways to build your arguments rigorously, to communicate them in compelling ways online, and to address counter-arguments.
• Journalists. You are interested in how new media could change the shape of the climate change debate, and whether international climate summits could be made more effective and accountable. Could the Web harness broader, deeper collective intelligence from parties normally excluded?
• Social Scientists. You may be studying the public discourse of the climate change debate, and are interested in how new media could shape this. Or you may be interested in the practices associated with the deployment of technology of this sort.