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Global Challenges

A topic map of global wicked issues started by George Mobus (see expanded text for details).

George Mobus posted  the following on the Global Sensemaking site:
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The topic tree forms a basic backbone to guide parsing the global challenges domain. I'm not sure how this might work in other discourse platforms (e.g. IBIS-based) but the structure is more suggestive of ways to think about how we tackle the issues. This is how I have thought about structured discourse in my ConsensUs project.

These are just a few items at what seem to me to be appropriate levels of analysis, and just for a starting point for discussion. The last one is for those of us thinking about providing the tools to those engaged in the others!

I think it should be clear that the above tree, a topic decomposition structure, suggests cross linkage relations that turn it into a graph (Relational links). I think of this graph as directed with edges possibly going both directions to indicate mutual or circular causality (e.g. global warming and climate change with positive feedbacks like methane release). Additionally, edges can conceivably cross levels (as in population size affecting food challenges and energy production). I imagine a number of edge types similar to what are found in semantic nets. Relations covering things like causes, supports, etc.

In any case the idea is to develop an overall map of the sense making challenges and then attach issues, commentary, and analysis to each node as the work proceeds. What we need is a way to visualize the map so that contributors can add nodes and edges as needed to make links. I've also indicated something Robert suggested: A model can be attached to nodes as support for commentary and issue exploration.

This 'map' is just for example purposes. The topics/sub-topics are just my first pass at trying to establish some kind of structure and in no way represents a complete or correct topic breakdown. I suspect that we can deliberate and make sense of a better parsing to everyone's general satisfaction if there is consensus about taking a direction like this."


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