This worshop was led by Paul Fernhout on the theme of tools for collective sensemaking and civic engagement.
The first part of the workshop consisted of developing a simple IBIS concept map in Compendium as a demonstration of how creating an IBIS map can create a spirit of camaraderie, collaboration, and mutual respect even among people who do not agree on divisive topics.
The rest of the workshop involved presenting and discussing the following links. We explored the difference between collective sensemaking inside a specific organization and participatory sensemaking involving all stakeholders both inside and outside of an organization. In the background was a theme of (in Manuel De Landa's terms) considering the appropriate balance between meshworks and hierarchies, as well as the issue of the interplay between reason and values/emotions. In general, IBIS represents a tool that emphasizes engagement through collective reasoning, whereas Rakontu focuses on engagement through collective real-life narrative stories (with emotional content). Unfortunately we ran out of time before being able to discuss Rakontu in detail. We also discussed an issue raised in a previous day's developer conference session by someone handling (IIRC) Albany County's public records about some public fears of too much information being either collected or made available by government and how participatory processes might help address that issue.
Search: Seven Tribes (now Eight Tribes) « Public Intelligence Blog (Many types of organziations collect infromation and do sensemaking about it in various ways)
EFF: TIA:Genoa II
HSC - Home
HSC - The RAHS Programme
Son of TIA: Pentagon Surveillance System Is Reborn in Asia (A criticism of data mining programs)
Unwired: Cognitive Edge (A rebuttal of the above as a defense of multi-perspective tools, but there is still the issue of meshwork/hierarchy balance and participation)
Deep Blue Sea (1999) - IMDb (An image of people's fears about bigger smarter government if it is unconnected to essential human values)
Communication 4D: The role of citizen journalism in promoting good governance in Sri Lanka (An image of government as cooperative computer-mediated service)
Virtue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (An example of how many different virtues/values there are out there, which can lead to disagreeing about the relative priority of each)
File:Inglehart Values Map.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Different priorities about virtues may have some broad geographical clusterings based on shared local history)
Zero News Datapool, MANUEL DE LANDA, MESHWORKS,HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES
Descartes' Error - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (All reasoning needs emotion and values to drive it to a conclusion -- there is no "reason" to reason or prioritize otherwise)
HowStuffWorks "Pump It Up" (Technology is an amplifier; what virtues and values do we want it to amplify?)
Douglas Engelbart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Inventor of the mouse and an early pioneer in the 1960s of the idea of participatory collective computing to resolve difficult problems, although Theodore Sturgeon also had a related Xanadu vision in the 1950s which inspired Ted Nelson and thus hypertext and the Web, as did others like Vannevar Bush in the 1940s with Memex.)
Stigmergic collaboration - Meta Collab
Issue-Based Information System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (IBIS)
SEAS Homepage (Propritary, used for structured arguements by intelligence analysts)
Angler: A Thinking Tool (Proprietary, used to overcoem bias by intelligence analysts)
NICs - Doug Engelbart Institute (Networked Imporvement Communities, co-evolving tools, content, processes, and human learning)
Institute for 21st Century Agoras (Another approach to participatory democratic discussions)
Compendium (software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (FOSS)
File:Compendium.v1.5.2-Screenshot.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cohere >>> make the connection (FOSS)
Narrative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rakontu - Home
Rakontu - Elevator pitch (FOSS)
Rakontu - Screenshots - Members
Story colored glasses: Steal these ideas (Attendees were encouraged to use the Rakontu ideas in their own ways)
Other items that were referred to:
"The argumentative theory of reasoning"
"Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate"
"Scott Page on Diversity and Pluralism"
"Participatory Narrative Inquiry"
Results
Here is the example concept map we developed (with contributions from Andrew, Jenn, and Sam, and a bit of cleanup by Paul afterwards) -- it does not cover all the issues we discussed, and it was intended more as an example with some ideas than a definitive map:
