The state of play with this map as at the start of 2011

We discussed how to approach this topic on the weekend of 18-19 December 2010 using the Debategraph discussion Stream.

The subject matter is vast, so we decided to begin by addressing The Web and the Open Society. This is a matter on which there has been a spate of articles and books in recent times, notably Cass R. Sunstein’s Republic.com (second edition 2007). It concerns how the web and related technologies are re-shaping public discourse in both democracies and autocratic states.

Even this is a very big topic, so to help get things going a 'seeding map' has been created that models a panel debate on essentially the same topic that took place in May 2010 that involved some major players on the web, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The debate entitled  Does the Internet Favor Dictators or Dissenters is available on YouTube and provides a good opportunity to see how a such a debate can be modeled as a piece of structured argument.

To do this, we have used a feature that YouTube call deep linking - but we have not used YouTube's own implementation since it only allows linking to a time point in a video. For argument mapping, we need to be able to link to a time slice with both a beginning and end point. Fortunately an outfit at tubechop.com has provided a very nice way to take a cleaver to a YouTube video.

Take a look around this map to see how it works - just click the sphere in the Explorer view. Arguments are paraphrased and fitted into a structured argument map - and you can see whether our paraphrase does justice to the point by looking a the speaker's original YouTube articulation.

Next steps

The next steps in 2014 will include:

1. Setting regular weekly times for live discussions of the map. Times will be chosen so people in different times zones are accommodated - all who have expressed interest will be canvassed for times that suit early in the new year.
2. Setting the initial structure for The Web and the Open Society debate map after reviewing and discussing the seed map that has been added here, and beginning to build the map structure.
3. Writing to some of the main protagonists in the public debate on this topic to seek their involvement in the project.