This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’ that Paul introduced yesterday.

Debategraph: One way of mapping arguments

With all the talk about brand new crowdsourcing platforms, and letting the population ‘speak their minds‘, it’s easy to forget the mass of already-expressed opinion that exists in electronic form, and that can inform future debates. Not only the millions of overtly political blogs, but regular blogs, online newspapers, Wikis, and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph.

Billions of individual thoughts and personal experiences have been written about, from all conceivable perspectives. No policy process is likely to come up with ideas that have never been thought of before; so expressed opinion represents an archive – a knowledge base – that should not be ignored. Here’s why:

• It already exists – the mental work has already been done.
• It happened – it’s a record of what happened when particular policies were tried.
• It’s not just blogs: thanks to TheyWorkForYou, Hansard reports and transcripts of Select Committees make for highly-detailed content.
• It can be linked-in: it can be dynamically matched, linked, and related to brand new policy debates.
• It can be made fresh – it can be given a new lease of life when updated collaboratively.
• It’s as good a source as any – basing arguments in brand new policy debates around what happens to be current in the mainstream media will inevitably produce less diverse, more error-prone, and less extensively scrutinised results than using sources that have already been run past potentially hundreds of human brains.
• There may be no alternative – it enables, and bootstraps new policy debates, bringing in the words of those who haven’t yet joined – or even heard of – the new platform.

The challenge of using technology to make sense of all this political information is what concerns us now.

My new project – Poblish.org – aims to put this content to use, and to collapse the distinctions between the worlds of blogging, collaborative editing, and debate mapping. The result will be a collaborative ‘open data’ platform that works for both bloggers and policy-makers, and that will nurture an ecosystem of new political data tools. Hopefully the Labour-themed iPhone app Paul mentioned yesterday will be merely the first of these.

I will be explaining more about Poblish in future posts: the particular problems it was designed to address, the questions it tries to answer, and more about how it can improve policy-making.

I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look.

Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in itself.

What is interesting is Sunstein’s discussion of how that polarisation happens and what the consequences of it are. He’s also very good on the question of  how extremism isn’t always a bad thing.

More of that another time though. The reason I’m drawing attention to it is that I think Cass would be interested in this exercise that I kicked off yesterday – almost on a whim.

Slugger O’Toole is a site that I contribute to occasionally, as well as working with it’s founder on some offline projects. The site is largely devoted to issues in Northern Ireland’s politics, and Mick has often noted a phenomenon called ‘Whataboutery.’

It’s something of a conversation killer.  A recent example that I found was where someone from Sinn Féin outlined views on violence against women. One of the first comments that appeared under the blog-post discussing this was that Sinn Féin members had no place discussing violence against women – after all, hadn’t the IRA killed lots of women in it’s time?

As points go, it’s not irrelevant, but neither was it designed to take the conversation about domestic violence to a productive place. (A clever commenter replied that Protestants had no grounds to speak about violence against women either – after all, Henry VIII beheaded two of his wives!)

Therefore, the reason I thought it would be a good idea to use debategraph to map ‘Whataboutery’ is because all of that enthusiasm for presenting one narrow exclusive point of view could be used to create something that the rest of us can use. Use the ‘hive mind’ comprised of the users of a large-ish website to construct a working model of a complex problem.

It also illustrates, I think, how active citizenship can be harnessed for the greater good. In the past, I’ve argued that consultations are often objectively undemocratic because they massively over-represent the views of people who feel strongly on specific issues and / or have more time on their hands than the rest of us.

The self-styled classical liberal blogger Tim Worstall has coined ‘Worstall’s Law of Organizations: “All and any organizations will in the end be run by those who stay awake in committee …”

But active citizenship works – I would suggest – when these people – often time-rich fanatics – have to compete with each other for the privilege of representing us for a few years at a time. As this debategraph illustrates, they may also be useful recruits to a hive mind mapping exercise. Perhaps we can learn a lot by listening to their general buzz of fanatics and busybodies even if we’d prefer to ignore their individual voices?

David of Debategraph has dissected the G20 communique, using his Debategraph application.

Quite a brilliant idea, Debategraph. It does everything that a pro-democracy technology should do – it enables a wide range of people to rationalise a problem. Once that’s done, elected politicians can make and explain their decisions – not in terms of interests bought off / betrayed, but as a decision made as a result of a series of trade-offs.

Debategraph makes us all ‘eavesdropable.’ Its worth a million consultations, petitions and ‘have your say’ exercises. Crowdsourcing opinion is as easy as crowdsourcing idiocy, and barely more valuable. Crowdsourcing judgment – and this is what Debategraph does – is invaluable.

Oh, have I said? I really really like Debategraph….