Interview with David Price on Debategraph: What it is and what's next

Thanks Dave, it’s a pleasure to be here, and I am really looking forward to the multi-way interaction.

A creative commons, social venture that combines argument mapping and wiki-editing to let people around the world collaboratively map contentious public issues; so that the best arguments on all sides of any debate can be freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

Most of the maps are in an early stage of development themselves—like Wikipedia in early 2001 rather than 2008—and open to further collaborative refinement. But, for example, as well as the map on Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, there are maps on how the international community should respond to Iranian nuclear policy, climate change, drugs policy, abortion. In an educational rather than public policy context there’s also a map of 50 years of philosophical debate on artificial intelligence (building on Bob Horn’s pioneering work in this field). Once logged-in, anyone can create a map—and edit, extend, rate and comment on all the existing maps.

It’s a perfect example of the flow of emergent and generous conversation across the web. Seb Schmoller found, and was intrigued, by Debategraph, and asked us for a guest blog post. David saw the blog post and responded with a characteristically encouraging and insightful commentary—followed by a call for open debate on Obama’s running mate, which inspired us to seed and post the initial debate map.

[Ed: the Obama's Vice President debate]

My colleague, Peter Baldwin, is a former cabinet minister in the Keating administration in Australia, and I have worked as a public policy advisor in the UK. Having seen the policy system from the inside, we both felt that the way that we address and resolve complex and contentious issues in public life is broken—and it is broken at a time when it has never been more important for this system to function effectively. Independently we arrived at the conclusion that argument mapping offered a way bringing greater transparency and efficiency to this process, and that the read/write technology emerging on the web offered a way to open up this process to the collective intelligence and scrutiny of the creative commons.

Appropriately enough, we discovered each other via the web. Peter had begun to develop an initial version of the software, and I found his work while researching developments in the field. We struck up a tremendous collaborative relationship over the net immediately—Peter lives in the Blue Mountains in Australia and I live in Somerset in the UK—and have been working full time together at opposite ends of the world across the last two years.

For all the development work already embodied in Debategraph, we see ourselves as being at the start of long adventure. We are already working on simplifying and extending the user interface and developing the next generation of map visualisations. Over time, the ways that people interact with the Debategraph (the graph of all the interrelated debate maps), and the devices via which they do so, will change significantly. We are also beginning to engage with the semantic web and linked data community, which will enable the collective knowledge and understanding embodied in Debategraph to be made available contextually wherever people are on the web. Serving sense not Ad-Sense.

A significant enhancement released today is the ability for people to embed fully-functional live debate maps on their own websites (as well as the existing asynchronously updating snapshots). This makes it possible for people participating across multiple sites to build a single, cumulative, structured map of a debate without leaving their home site; so that contributions from the participants on any of the sites will appear immediately across all of the sites.

This points to a potentially profound change in the way that the web enables us to deliberate on complex issues in society—and we hope to catalyze our contribution to this process by working with clusters of NGOs and other policy stakeholders on a range of public policy issues in the weeks to come.

Peter and I see Debategraph as belonging to a new category of web-based tools and part of a wider, emerging movement towards a different quality of dialogue, deliberation and understanding in society. A web-based augmentation of individual and collective human intelligence that is potentially comparable to, and a countervailing balance to, the predicted singularity of artificial intelligence.

There are many other examples of excellent work in this emerging domain, including, for example, Mark Klein’s and Luca Iandoli’s work on the Climate Collaboratorium at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the Cohere and Compendium projects from the Open University’s KMi team, led by Simon Buckingham Shum.

As the logic underpinning these tools, and the wider momentum of the web, is towards connection, we are starting to gather informally as a group—under the Global Sensemaking banner—to explore how we can develop the next generation of these interconnected systems together.

In doing so, we are all motivated by the perception that humanity faces an emerging mess of global challenges—e.g. climate change, poverty, peak oil, population pressure, water shortages, declining biodiversity, and failing food supply—that are the product of thoughts and actions that no longer make sense—and that we need new tools of thought if we are to adapt to the scale and complexity of these challenges.

Currently, we are in the early stages of defining our objectives and methods of working together as a group, and will launch formally later this year. However, anyone who is interested in joining us in this process is welcome to contact me now at david [at] debategraph [dot] org.

Anyone is free to log-in and start participating in the maps on Debategraph straightaway—and bloggers and website owners are welcome to embed the relevant debates on their sites to open up a new kind of communication with their readers and to contribute to the development of the debate maps as a public resource.

We are also about to launch a series of live blogging interviews around several of the maps, featuring experts from all sides of the relevant debates.

You can comment on the individual elements of a debate map in much the same way as you would comment on a blog; so the learning curve for initial participation is quite low.

Adding new arguments to a map, and creating your own maps, involves understanding the basic building blocks of the map (e.g. Issues, Positions, and Supportive and Opposing Arguments) and how they fit together. Rather like a Lego set, large-scale, complex maps develop through simple combinations and recombinations of a relatively small set of blocks.

Beyond that the roles that develop around a debate map are broadly the same as you would expect to find in other wiki-based communities, with many of the same organisational principles and issues at play.

My sense is that the fundamental insight from the movement underway with the web is less about how changes of this kind will impact within the existing framework, but how they will change the framework itself. So for me the question is not so much about how we get our representatives to pay attention within the existing framework, but rather who will be the first representative(s) to seize on the huge opportunities opening as this framework changes, and when…

I have really enjoyed the process, Dave—and many thanks to you and everyone else who has participated.