ESSENCE

COP15 debate mapping teams in action

sbs — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:53:42 +0000

The last two weeks saw two different teams mapping the debate around the COP15 Climate Change conference, in the process putting two of the tools through their paces. The first team (Debategraph, Cognexus Institute and Seven Sigma) set up camp at CopenhagenSummitMap.org, using Debategraph to run live and post-hoc issue mapping sessions as the conference unfolded. Here’s a screen from the website:

…and the interactive Debategraph applet:

The second team [mission] came from the Hypermedia Discourse group at the Open University’s Knowlege Media Institute, who focused on testing their Cohere tool, in particular, its Mozilla browser Extension (works in Firefox & Flock) that supports semantic annotation of websites. The screen below shows the sidebar with different kinds of annotation in the margin, anchored to one or more text clips of interest:

This map illustrates the emerging network of ideas as multiple analysts annotated websites (half working on news media, blogs and twitter, and half on Open Educational Resources, to assess the difference). These annotations were semantically connected in order to test the hypothesis that we could prevent the emergent web from degenerating into mere spaghetti, but instead, support a form of collective intelligence:

Individual Ideas (below), Connections or whole Maps can be embedded as interactive widgets:

Reflections on how these exercises went will be posted as we review the data.

ESSENCE in The Independent in Spring 2009

anna — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:56:50 +0000

Thanks to the GREAT work of one of the ESSENCE team member (David Price), the ESSENCE project has been brought to the attention to The Independent Newspaper.
Visit the Independent website to read the story.
The Independent has engage with Debategraph, one of the ESSENCE tools for online deliberation, in the project to involve The Independent readers to develop an on line map that represent the main issues around climate change that are confronting the negotiators of the new international climate change treaty.

Here below you find the map result of the online debate. It is a interactive map, so you can participate to the debate directly from the ESSENCE website.

David Price from Debategraph

First Essence09 workshop – KMi, The Open University, May 5-6

anna — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:47:55 +0000

The ESSENCE team in a snapshot taken during the workshop: from left to right: Jack Park, Simon Buckingham Shum, David Price, Luca Iandoli, Aldo de Moor and Anna De Liddo

On the 5th and 6th of May the first ESSENCE workshop has been hosted in KMi (Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) .
The workshop has been organized to be both a face-to-face meeting between some of the ESSENCE team members (mainly form the UK and Nederland based members) and also to consult with subject matter experts in the climate change field with the overall goal in mind to understand how online deliberation technologies can enhance their work practices.
The subject matter experts that participated to the workshop are:
• Joe Smith (Creative Climate Project, The Open University),
• Stephen Peake (The Open University),
• Jane Corbett (LLCC, The Open University),
• Attila Tóth (ourclimate.eu network),
• Ray Taylor (Land, Atmosphere and Resilience Initiative)
The workshop operative objective has been to define the ESSENCE next steps and to delineate what contribution the ESSENCE project could bring to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year (COP15).
During the workshop several ESSENCE technologies have been showcased. Compendium and Cohere from KMi have been demonstrated together with other ESSENCE technologies such as Debategraph and MIT Climate Change Deliberatorium. The workshop developed a roadmap for ESSENCE to COP15 and explored strategies for further research lines and challenges to be addressed for the ESSENCE team/GSm community.

ESSENCE target communities?

anna — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:48:42 +0000

We are asking ourselves if there are particular communities whom we should
invite to join ESSENCE. While we list a broad set of groups on the website,
we need to refine this.

For instance:

It may be that something this novel won’t be appealing to the top
climate scientists and policymakers: it’s too novel, they are already very
busy people engaged in ongoing initiatives, and although ESSENCE is
initiated by academically respectable collaboration technology groups,
clearly, we’re still something of an unknown quantity. But perhaps we can
engage the next generation of postdoctoral researchers and policy analysts,
who have already built up some expertise in their fields, are more tech
savvy, and who may be open to new ways to make a difference…
We list the COP15 conference as an example of the target audience we are aiming to impact, but clearly that is only one engine of change. There are active networks of scientists, engineers and funders trying to move in

an agile manner with proposals that may also have higher impacts on shorter
timescales. We have some signs that they would welcome free, open
sensemaking infrastructure to support their efforts.

Just two examples. Your views welcomed.

Discuss this in:

CI/Argumentation in UN State of the Future Report

sbs — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:53:54 +0000

The State of the Future 2008 report is out now from the World Federation of UN Associations Millennium Project, with an updated analysis of the 15 global challenges that its worldwide panel have been analysing for 12 years now. The Independent summarised it quite helpfully recently.

Of particular interest from the ESSENCE perspective is Chapter 6: Global Energy Collective Intelligence. Jerry Glenn, the Millennium Project Director, lays out the case for a distributed, collective intelligence network dubbed GENIS (Global Energy Network & Information System), which includes the kind of structured, graphical deliberation and argumentation tools being deployed in ESSENCE.

The first figure reproduced here shows the core visual language called IBIS (Issue-Based Information System) around which many of the sensemaking tools on offer for ESSENCE are based (CoPe_it!, Cohere, Compendium, Debategraph, Deliberatorium).

The Chapter 6 appendix (on the CD accompanying the report) provides interface mockups, including this Compendium aerial view by Jeff Conklin.

So, one of the Taskforces which emerges in ESSENCE could work on a GENIS-like use-case scenario (the report offers several) to serve as a pilot assessment of the pragmatics of GENIS…

Welcome to ESSENCE

sbs — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:15:21 +0000

This site explains how to participate in the internet dialogue and debate experiment that we are calling ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change.

The ESSENCE project runs from the Autumn of 2008.