<draft-subject to change>

A Narrative Arc

There is a narrative arc in play:

It starts with a personal interest in Taming Information.

It has landed at Tamnig Conversations.

Background

Douglas  Engelbart's Vision

Engelbart's vision entailed two primary entities: humans, and the tools they use.  In our context, tools consist of information technology, perhaps: socio-technological infrastructures, including  web portals and desktop applications (frontside) and the databases and analytical software behind those (backside).

His primary claim is that, in order to raise the capabilities o of those two entities, which he called a Capabilities Infrastructure, there must be a co-evolutionary process in play: both human capabilities must co-evolve along with their tools.

For that reason, our narrative arc must entail that co-evolution.

Taming information

This is, fundamentally, a technology issue.

Through my lens, taming information is the process of organizing and indexing ideas, and connecting them where appropriate.

Organizing the topics in a book is the task of an index in the back of that book. That index points to all occurrences of that topic (typically page numbers) and an occasional relation such as "see also".

We need more that that. We need a roadmap around our topics (think: a GPS for our subjects).

Subject Maps

An important aspects of connections between subjects is that they each have a biography.

And some of those connections may be contested.

Consider the abstract example:

X causes Y

We identify the subjects as:

• X
• Y
• The claim that X causes Y

That claim has a biography.  For instance, we may have found it in several refereed conference papers, or maybe just Joe Sixpack made the claim at a bar.  Biographies carry a lot of  weight in any information system: Context.

At the same time, this claim has been found:

X does not cause Y

That claim also has a biography.,

So now, we must weight aspects of each biography to gather evidence for the truth in this context.

Meanwhile, in a complete roadmap, we must connect the two claims with a disagrees with coherence relation.

The roadmap is called a Subject Map (aka: TopicMap).

Flows to Stocks

todo

Taming Conversations

Towards technological solutions

I started a PhD research project at the Open University (Milton Keynes, U.K.) under Simon Buckingham Shum.  The plan was to find a way to make improvements on IBIS conversations about climate change.  My goal:  use a specific capability of a subject map - it's topic merge  tools to isolate conversation nodes which say the same thing, and merge them, thus improving the Signal to Noise Ratio  (SNR) of the conversation.

Consider this example of two nodes:

CO2 causes climate change.

Climate change is caused by carbon dioxide.

English-speakers readily see the sameness in those two statements; we grow up learning all manner of lexical rules and synonyms.  Computers don't have those skills.

We build those into our topic merging toolbox.

Both claims, when normalized and an appropriate synonym is chosen, we get this merged claim:

CO2 cause climate change

To a computer, in JSON format, it is this "triple":

{

"subject" : "CO2"

"predicate" : "cause"

"object" : "climate change"

}

A subject map would then convert that JSON object into a collection of topic nodes in its map.

In terms of "artificial intelligence" (AI), this is a symbolic approach. Each node's identifier becomes a symbol in a symbolic AI platform.

By way of contrast, each word in the original claim becomes amalgamated into a cluster of numeric vectors for use in LLMs.

Towards sociological (human) solutions

The Theory U image paints a picture of our space. Theory U is the work of the Presencing Institute and U-School of Transformational Change.

Consider the left-hand side as a space for sensemaking, one in which all participants work together to make sense of the issue at hand.  Making sense has two critical components:

• Organizing and processing all knowable information related to the issue; this is where tools are used to organize and deliberate on the issue
• Dealing with the attitudes, identities, biases - the belief systems of the participants: their behaviors in the overall process; fundamentally, the human side of Engelbart's vision.

At the bottom of the U, all participants are said to be present in the situation. That is, (in theory), they all know where each other stands, and they "grok" the available information

Climbing the right side is where deliberation and sensemaking now leads to decision making.

From that, the SenseCraft vision has chosen to adapt game mechanics and guild social dynamics as a framework in which participants can grow beyond their own beliefs and identity, and improve their collective sensemaking skills.

A Final Cause

This is the SenseCraft vision:

To organize an ecosystem of financially sustainable NGOs and tools which can, at once:

• Tame the necessary global conversations about truly complex and urgent issues
• Tame the information space in which those conversations take place

Our Approach

Games

Game structures allow us to treat truth as a destination in truth-seeking journeys which we call Quests.  Games can collect worldviews and their justifications (evidence) or rebuttals (evidence).

The marriage of World of Warcraft and Global Sensemaking occured to me in a conversation with Martin Radley after he asked this question in a meeting:

How can we have civil conversations online about politics?

That's when I proposed the marriage,.  On that day, we formed what would become TopicQuests Foundation.

Soon after, John Seely Brown would start a video with this claim:

I would rather hire a high level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard

Federation

Federation is the process by which information resources from authenticated sources are shared into an artifact - a kind of Digital Public Library - in which they are subjected to the information taming process described above.