Debategraph
Debategraph.org has ambitious goals. It wants to provide a public, commons-based wiki where we can lay out the great political debates systematically, rationally, and calmly. The tool creates highly structured maps consisting of relatively atomized arguments. (The tool itself is pretty darn cool.)
I’m dazzled by it. I’m not convinced that debates can be commoditized the way knowledge can be, and I’m not convinced that debates won’t lose what’s really going on in them when they are forced into rational outlines, and I’m not convinced that debates are really about what they say they are, and I’m not convinced that the truly deep divides are actually debates. But, “I’m not convinced” means only that I don’t know what to think. More important, Debategraph gives us an infrastructure of some depth and power. We’ll figure out what to do with it. I hope.
Take a look. It’s damn interesting. (Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.)
David,
Many thanks for the encouragement. We are still in the early, experimental stages of a long-term development process with tools of this kind—iterating to figure out what works and doesn’t work—and, of course, Everything is Miscellaneous is fascinating and generative in this context.
The profound questions you identify above are very much live for us as well while we iterate, and the insights we gain on questions of this kind may prove to be amongst the most interesting results to emerge from this process.
In the meantime, if there’s a vexing and/or complex debate that you would be curious to see mapped using our current approach, let me know and I’ll gladly begin to develop the map.
David
[...] In the wonderful way of the web, a generous invitation from Seb Schmoller to guest blog an overview post about Debategraph, led to encouraging and deeply insightful feedback from David Weinberger about Debategraph. [...]
[...] tool itself is pretty darn cool… Take a look. It’s damn interesting.” David Weinberger (Co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, and Fellow at [...]