Looking at the Personal Democracy Forum session on ‘New Tools for Listening‘, there’s a presentation from Localocracy and Opinion Space along with a quick trot through Google Moderator (which has now been integrated into YouTube to help deal with their burgeoning comments issues there).
Opinion Space: A topography of arguments: You're in there somewhere...
It’s an interesting approach that allows people to participate in local discussions if they can validate themselves against the local electoral roll (I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t be possible under UK legislation but I’d be glad to be contradicted).
Step three of Conor White Sullivan’s presentation is an injunction to ‘Do Awesome Stuff’ which is, I think you’ll agree, pretty annoying.
It’s worth sitting through to get to Ken Goldberg though. Ken looks at ways to mine huge amounts of commentary without being hampered either by the binary nature (the like / unlike button) or the linearity of 4 squillion people responding to something that Mark Zuckerberg or Clay Shirky have to say.He showcases ‘Opinionspace‘ – a ‘collaborative filtering‘ project that allows users to identify people who share their general views. Once they’ve done that, they post comments and then rank each others’ contributions – saying whether you agree or not – and whether you find their comments more insightful or not.
It throws up the particularly interesting space where people don’t agree but do commend insight. It looks to promote interaction between different political positions, avoiding the problems of cyber-polarisation and it analysis the language used to create a topography of arguments as a way of informing politicians how public discussion is shaped on a particular subject.
Clay Shirky then asks the question that this blog would always ask – about how this participatory politics dovetails with the existing representative democracy settlements. But I’m spoiling it for you…..
