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Chris Tomich, a mild mannered dialogue mapper and SharePoint consultant from Seven Sigma of sunny Perth, Western Australia, felt that the forthcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is a critical moment in history. This is where the global community will come together to take real and concrete steps in dealing with challenges presented by climate change. This is one of the most complex yet critical problems facing humanity, and Chris hit upon the idea of utilising his sensemaking skills in making the dialogue and discourse from the summit available to a wider audience.
Chris realised that this could not be done alone, so he called in the assistance of his colleagues at Seven Sigma as well as his mentor, and inventor of Dialogue mapping, Jeff Conklin of the Cognexus Institute for help. Jeff loved the idea, and put the word out to his small army of sense makers to mobilise.
Chris then contacted David Price of Debategraph, who also jumped at the plan. Debategraph is a terrific argument visualisation tool that allows rich global collaboration on difficult issues, presented in a way that is accessible and clear. This is a true collaborative effort that will allow the world to examine the deeper threads of the various, complex and interrelated issues forming the climate change challenge.
Our intention is to build a rich map of information taken from a variety of sources including live/delayed web casts of the conference and any other materials made available from the conference. The process of building the maps aims to be unbiased and all information is considered suitable content for the maps.
If you are interested in finding out more about this site, contributing and/or any other information please email any of our people at the following addresses
Next scheduled live mapping session will be announced soon.
Dialogue Mapping is a novel method that allows groups to better deal with the sort of tricky, complex problems that typically cause a group stress, chaos and pullback. This is acheived by capturing the various threads of an issue and then expressing it visually in the form of an argument 'map'. This visual map represents the collected rationale in a simple, easy to understand form.
The information collected during a discussion (or 'mapping session') is broken down into questions, possible answers to those questions, and supporting and opposing arguments of those answers. Relationships are then drawn between the captured the components of the conversation. The ultimate purpose of the map is to capture and share the collective knowledge of all the participants without prejudice and presented in a format that can be easily understood by all observers.
As the ultimate purpose of Dialogue Mapping is to capture information and present it in a manner that supports further collaboration, it is the ideal platform on which to base discussions of complex issues.
The current debates and challenges being faced by global climate change present a perfect example of an extremely complex problem (also known as a 'Wicked Problem') for which many varying, yet equally valued, opinions exist. The topics that require exploration are not just confined to the science behind global climate change but there are sociological and economic repercussions that need to be considered as well. Additional to the vast array of opinions and ideas, each of these areas requires a deep level of understanding before meaningful analysis of the value of their content, within the context of global climate change, can be performed.
For more information on Dialogue Mapping and related topics like Wicked Problems and Issue mapping, head to CogNexus Institute.
As the ultimate purpose of Dialogue Mapping is to capture information and present it in a manner that supports further collaboration, it is the ideal platform on which to base discussions of complex issues.
The current debates and challenges being faced by global climate change present a perfect example of an extremely complex problem (also known as a 'Wicked Problem') for which many varying, yet equally valued, opinions exist. The topics that require exploration are not just confined to the science behind global climate change but there are sociological and economic repercussions that need to be considered as well. Additional to the vast array of opinions and ideas, each of these areas requires a deep level of understanding before meaningful analysis of the value of their content, within the context of global climate change, can be performed.
For more information on Dialogue Mapping and related topics like Wicked Problems and Issue mapping, head to CogNexus Institute.
The following list of free tools are recommended for anyone interested in getting involved with mapping of complex problems.
Debategraph is the software being used by this site to display the maps for the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Summit. It is a free online tool that runs on Macromedia Flash.
For more information about Debategraph go to http://debategraph.org
To support use of Debategraph within Microsoft SharePoint systems, Seven Sigma Business Solutions developed a web part to help aid with the displaying of Debategraph maps within Microsoft SharePoint. This is a free download available from this site and can be installed onto WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007.
Click here to download the WSP solution file for the web part.
Compendium is an open source software tool written in Java by the Compendium Institute that provides a flexible visual interface for managing the connections between information and ideas.
For more information about Compendium and to download it, go to http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institute/