ESSENCE is the first public event organised by Global Sensemaking (GSm), a network formed in 2008 to develop human-centred computing tools to help tackle wicked problems such as Climate Change.

GSm has a particular interest in Digital Deliberation technology, the skillsets and work practices required to make them work, and the technical architecture required for interoperability. These techniques have the potential to provide a structured medium for building collective intelligence from diverse stakeholders, who often disagree.

ESSENCE was conceived by Dr Simon Buckingham Shum, Senior Lecturer at the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, and Dr David Price, Social Entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Debategraph, and is coordinated jointly with Dr Mark Klein, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

An International Advisory Panel is now being assembled.