 David was the co-finder of debate graph, which is about producing effective argumentation. And that was piloted with the Prime Minister's office and has been used by the independent European Commission. And I believe the talk is on thinking deeply together. That's great, thank you. Following on from Jonathan's talk, I'm going to show you what I've been fiddling with over the last few years. Also, for questions afterwards, and if you grab me after the end of the lecture as well, think about what I'm about to describe through the lens that Jonathan was describing. I'd be very interested to get your feedback on that. So, I'm going to start with a story. Sorry about this. Now I'll start with a story. So, in 2006, Banksy, the British graffiti artist, held his first show in Los Angeles. He rented out a warehouse, and as one of the exhibitions, one of the centrepieces or cornerpieces of it, he created a mock living room and took an elephant, a 38-year-old Indian elephant called Ty, painted Ty to match the wallpaper in the room with Fleur de Lis, and put it there for people to come and look at. And Banksy's reasoning for this was, he described as follows, the show is about the elephant in the room, the problems that we don't talk about, the fact that 10 billion people live below the poverty line, he has an artist's side for numbers, the fact that 1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and the fact that 800 million people are sick to the death of artists telling them what a bad place the world is without actually ever doing anything about it. So, a statement on one level about global poverty and the endemic and systemic nature of it. Of course, though, if you put, as Lekoff will tell you, if you put an elephant in a room or ask people not to think about an elephant, the first thing that will happen is that people start to think about the elephant. And so, some of the reaction around this event, the Los Angeles Animal Services Department has had to give a licence for Ty the elephant to be used as part of the process. And when they discovered exactly how it was being used that had been painted in this way, their response to the event was, it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only okay, it's an art form. Permits will not be issued for such frivolous abuse of animals in the future. So, a very different take or perspective on a statement perhaps about global poverty. A third perspective on this was by Carrie Johnson, who was the owner of Ty and of her company, Have Drunk Will Travel. She said Ty didn't really know what the fuss was about. She said Ty has done many movies, she's used to make-up. Ty was unavailable for comment although believed that she has to deal with Max Clifford now. And we'll be following up with that. So, of course for many of you, and this is a fairly hackneyed example, I guess in this environment of the six blind men and the elephant. Anyone in here not heard this before? Okay, as there are a few hands, it's a poem about six blind men who go out to try and identify this object that's before them. One of them feels the elephant's tusk and concludes the elephant's sphere. One of them feels the elephant's trunk and concludes that it's a snake. One feels the elephant's ear and says it's a fan. One feels the side of the elephant and says it's a wall. One feels the legs of the elephant and says it's a tree trunk. And one feels the tail and says it's a rope. And the key part of this is the poem ends. ac mae'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod ysgolion, mae'n ddod o'r ddod yn ystod, a'r ddod yn ffawr o'r cymdeithasol, ond mae'n ddod yn eto ar gyfer gael, yn ddod yn y ddod yn gwrth. A nad oeddwn i'n ffasio, nad oeddwn i ddod o'r cymplectio i ddod yn yr oeddydd fawr o'r problemau yn gweithio ar gyfer y gyflwyngau a'r lleol i'r felum yn y ddod. Mae yma eich bod yn ystod oherwydd mae eich bod yn llwyddoedd ond mae'r ysgol yn ddechrau ac mae'n ddweud. Mae'r ysgol yn llwyafol ac mae'n ddweud yn llwyafol. Byddwn i'r ysgol yn y cyfnodd, mae'n ddweud yn y sphwng yn y ddweud yma yn y cyfnodd yma yn ei wneud. Mae'n ddweud yn y dyfodol yn y cyfnodd. o'r effants sydd gyda wasiatio, gweithio, hwngau, all croes a ffyniadau ar fyrdd eich murwys sydd wedi'i cael ei wahanol o'r ymdweithwyr gyda'r effants llwygaeth. Ar y cyfnod i weld yma, ymddydd i gofio i'r bwysig ar y dyfodol ymdyn nhw'n cynno cyllidebeth sydd ymddilladau ymddillad. A dyma'r prosnahau yn ei wneud i roi ddweud. Felly mae'r gweithio'r wahanol confusedwy deilig o gyngor, i ddweud yr oedd y cyfrifoedd yn erioed yn lluog ffordd yn ei gweithio. Yn yr adeg a'r blaen mwy o ddweud ynStartnau Gweithgwyrwyr ac gyfrifoedd tar iddyn nhw y ddigon o'r llawer yn y cyfrifoedd a'r gwyllfa er ownonol gweithio ei ddechrau'i gweithio'i gweithio. Mae'r Sefydl iawn eich chi'r hanfodol i'r ddalio'i dweithio yn aelod a yna y gallwn hi yw'r cyfnod ydych chi'n gwybod ar y dyfodol ac yn dweud y byd yma yw y ychydig yn ymgyrchu'r gwaith. Felly, rwy'n credu yma yw'r cyffredin? Ychydig yn fath o'r gymhau gyda'r gallu cefnod y cyffredin yn ychydig yn ei cyffredin yn cyngorol. ac mae'n fyddio'n meddwl ar y twiddedig, ychydig yn ysgol yw'r cyffredin sylwg a'r cyllidau Cereindiputys o fynd i livu lleonol, mae geniad, mi'n ffordd yn ei ddweud â'i cyfleolol.." ..y ffordd yn ei ddweud â'i ddweud â'u ddweud â'i ddweud â'u ddweud â'u ddweud â iechydau, sy'n ddim yn ychydigol i'n rhai oherwydd fel y dyfodol ond y maslyw, ond ond iddyn nhw'n dweud. Sefydlu strategiaeth, strategiaeth efallai, wrth gwrs, ond dw i'n gwerthoedd Siol. Fydd yn ddechrau, ymweld, y dyfodol ymarfer, oedd ymweld i'r cyfnodol yn gwneud hynny. A gynnodd y gwaith, ac felly rwy'n credu i'n ddweud y gwrthfawr, mae'n hynny'n bywys gydag yw ymweld. Yn amlwg, ac mae'n rhoi'n gweld i'r gael, bobl a blw yw'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod, the, we've had this tremendous proliferation of growth and the, of information and the ability to analyze that information and discover things from it, and that was really with, would building that with the first wave of the web and the second wave of the web is layering a social graph on top of that. It's the networks Facebook, Twitter, and all the other things that embody that. But also the conversations of flowing through those networks on blogs and other places as well, but the real opportunity, the real thing which the technology is beginning to open up to us is the third small piece at the top, which is the ability to structure meaning collectively and to lead to coherent action with that. The opportunity that's emerging with the internet now and with different visualisations is for the ability for us to network our thought in a really powerful way and in a way which perhaps gives us an ability which we've never had before to capture the complex and respond to the complex surfaces of the public policy problems that we confront. That was a preamble to talk about and describe what the work that I've been engaged in. I found a debate graph with Peter Baldwin who's a former minister of higher education in the Australian government. He retired from politics in the mid 1990s, frustrated at how difficult it was to engage people in nuanced thought, how difficult it is to step outside party political positions and saw collaborative editing of argument maps on the web as one way to do this. I came to it from a very similar perspective of concept mapping, working in mediation, working in public policy, seeing how inefficient the existing public consultation process is. The essence of this process is to begin to focus on the ideas that are there, to try and gather the ideas that are dispersed through the community, all of the ideas that are relevant, but to try and do that in a way that rather than representing ideas that appear many times in the flow of conversation, to try and distill them out so that you only represent them once. What you find is that if you begin to listen to the community, everything that the community has to offer, even with the complex problems like climate change, you begin to find that you get a curve of, as the first contributions are coming in, you get rapid, rapid flow of new ideas. But as you begin to work with that subject, you begin to find that the flow of ideas begins to slow and even out. So the question then is how do you begin to take this and to begin to capture it in a way that people can see and begin to build and refine. And so the approach that we've been experimenting with is a combination of argument mapping and dialogue mapping. And this is a field which has a long history. The first examples of argument maps that we've been able to find were in the 19th century in 1836 with Wotley producing a book of the logic of argument. It didn't really take off for quite a long period of time. It was popularised a bit more by Wigmore in the 20th century. And there are many pioneers in the field, Bob Horn, Tim Van Gelder and others, all working to explore how you can take arguments, begin to break them down, represent the thoughts in simple provisional building blocks and do that in a way that, so for example, the example that we have here, this is from a map that is in the middle east peace process that we're working on at the moment with the independent newspaper, where one of the issues, the question at the top is what should be done about Jerusalem as part of any peace process. Somebody has come to the site and suggested in a brainstorming way, a potentially interesting way of resolving the tensions in that context would be to move the UN headquarters to Jerusalem. And provided a reason for that, the economic stimulus to the region. So the idea is that you can begin to break down the thought into its component parts and then begin to assemble those parts in related ways. And you can do that in a form that enables you to build just through simple combinations of those questions and ideas and reasoning into complex maps. So this, again, is a map that we've been doing with the independent about what Obama should do next after the inauguration. And this is a map with over a thousand elements looking at different aspects of public policy. And it's a map that's been created by many people coming to the site, reading the arguments that others have put there, editing those arguments like Wikipedia, where they see gaps, adding new issues that need to be raised, new ideas for responding to those, and the reasoning supporting those. And you begin to iterate through this process until you have a comprehensive map of the subjects that are there. And you can do this in a way that the community that's working on this can rate the salience of the different issues, the quality of the different proposals that have been put forward in that context, and also the strength of the reasoning. So in some ways it becomes like a multi-dimensional pole of the community's thinking of the issues that it's confronting. And by externalising your thought in this way, sharing it with others, enabling others to build collaboratively with you on it, as that structure begins to change, those changes come back to you. So rather than us being constrained by the limits of holding 7 to 12 ideas or thoughts in our short term memory, you begin to create a structure which you can explore and see all of the thoughts from all of the different perspectives, all of the different frames that are present within that context. And beneath the surface of that, each of the individual parts of this map of the knowledge base that you're building can have as much detail as you need need. So you can have essay length descriptions that go into greater depth, images and video and things to take people to that as well. But it's not enough just to simply begin to build these structures. You've got to find a way to distribute them so that as many people as possible can see and begin to input into the process. And so what we've been doing with the independent is developing maps. These are interactive maps which if you click on the different spheres, new spheres expand and open up, and you can explore the whole of the meta-de bagraft that we're developing as part of this just simply through clicking around the structure. But you can take these maps. This is a map on climate change. And you can see that it's embedded on the independence website, but also in the images around. It's embedded on climate skeptic sites in Sweden, in US environmental activist sites, blogs in Brazil and New Zealand. And wherever anyone sees the map and sees gaps within the thinking, they're able to edit the map and refine and continue to improve it. And those changes ripple across all of the different places where the maps are displayed. And the reason why this is so important was captured in one of the observations by Bill Joy of some micro systems, which I've appropriated and changed a little bit, but that there are always more smart people outside government within it. And the challenge is how can we use the internet to begin to take this thought, this insight that's dispersed through the community to find for each of the subjects that we're looking at, the experts who have the particular insight into particular questions or have particular ideas that otherwise would not find a way to flow to the centre. And experts in this case can be in the context of climate change, can be somebody who's living next to a landfill site or somewhere where a windmill is being built. Expertise is if you have something significant that's novel or original that's not in the context of what's already understood to contribute to that process. And this is also a way of helping people to cope with the alienation that we face with the big scale of these social problems that we face as a society today because if you try to tackle all of it none of us has a sufficient perspective, a sufficient insight to be able to really see the whole. But if we can use the internet to open up structures that people can see and explore, find gaps, build, refine, then we've potentially got a mechanism to cope and address these and the types, the tangled problems that we confront require the coherent work of many eyes, many minds and many hands. So where are we in relation to the work that we've been doing? We've been fortunate to work in a small way with the White House and with Downing Street on the work that we're doing. And with others in the field at the Open University and MIT we're working on a project called Essence in the build up to Copenhagen in 2009 where we're trying to apply this process to the task of mapping the salient issues around the choices that are faced in Copenhagen in 2009, trying to give policy makers a different way to explore and see that subject as a whole. And so that process is underway. As a field there are still plenty of challenges ahead. As tool makers there are two dimensions that are critical for the field to develop. The first is the things that we as tool makers put in the way of using the tools and trying to find a way to minimise the learning curve for that. The ability to take is something which we're still learning, we've been iterating for a long period of time, we've still got a way to go. But we've seen as we've iterated that we'd be gradually drawing more people into the process and that's possible. The second dimension of the learning curve with this is that the actual process involves thinking hard. And I think there's an American comedian says that if you make people think that they're thinking hard they'll love you. But if you really make them think hard they'll hate you. And so there's a challenge as to whether the visual literacy that we've seen growing from with mind mapping coming into schools. When I was at school a long time ago I was probably the only person who was mind mapping at that time. Now my children are taught it at primary school as part of the curriculum. Challenge is whether we can see the kind of visual literacy that's involved in breaking argument and subjects down in this way. Coming more to the fore in society so that it's understood to be an essential literacy in society like reading is seen to be. Because the kinds of complex world that we're growing into needs tools of this kind that we and others are working on in order to enable us to grapple with and respond to that. At the moment it's a literacy that's more equivalent to musical literacy where some of people are encouraged to do it others take it to it more naturally. But it's not something that's widely prevalent in society as possible. And as speaking in an educational context one of the things that I feel is a huge opportunity is the way that we teach at universities that we ask students to do in the universities and the subjects that are applicable to the types of things that have been exploring. Often students are producing individual isolated work less so these days certainly which contribute nothing cumulatively to the directly to the social understanding and good. It's about the individuals learning. There's been some experiments that have been starting to use student projects using wikis and being graded on those in a public way. And we're starting to have classes using the maps as ways of the students coming together around a subject building their understanding of it engaging with each other in a deeper form of dialogue that the structured representation of the images allows. And if we could take even a small proportion of the energy that flows into the work that undergraduates are doing and direct it outwards towards cumulative public structures we could enrich not just the students and prepare them for this complex systemic world that we face. But also begin to fill in the gaps on all of the subjects that we need to address. So if I had one thing I would say there's a huge cognitive surplus potentially there waiting to be released and we could use that more efficiently and effectively. So thank you. That was the main thing I wanted to cover and if you have any questions I really appreciate them. Just before we pick up the questions can I just say I think that that talk reflects back beautifully the theme of the conference and dreams begins responsibility. I thought it was really quite interesting. So any questions? Yeah, amazing piece of technology. I wondered if you are familiar with them. Syntegrity, which was brought out in the 60s by Stafford Beers, which was a face to face kind of sharing of information through a community like this. And it was the process made sure that all parties met each other through a kind of mathematical facilitation. And what I was worried about was at least there was this kind of physical, you kind of had some reassurance that those people were witnessing each other's understanding of things. And online is there any way of knowing who's, you know, will there be that kind of follow through that people are looking at all those sides of the argument? There are several things there. The first I think Stafford Beers work obviously highly pertinent and influenced the whole field in which I'm working. There are too many people really to name check properly with that, but yes it's very important. The second aspect of that is no matter how good the work that you do online is physical presence is always going to be important part of that physical presence particularly in when you move towards coordinated action as well. And there is a real richness to dialogue between people in a physical space that's difficult to capture online. One of the things that we've learned over the last couple of years while we've been working on this is that and we've been thinking about that question. And actually we've just, if you look on the site it's live in a quiet way at the moment, but a way of trying to enable that sense of physical presence in the context of the maps. So there's a way in which you can see the map, you can see the stream of activity with images of the people who are doing the activity. People can converse with each other in threaded conversations around the map as the changes to the map are occurring live, everyone sees those changes to the map. And so one of the things that we're going to be experimenting with over the next few months is this sense of trying to gather people in this space online. But with that number not being limited by any physical capacity of a physical space. And to see whether we can really begin to get that kind of rich interaction in addition to the more forensic aspect of breaking down the structure and working with that structure. So it's an excellent question and certainly one of the challenges ahead for us. Hello, thanks very much. That was really interesting. I wanted to pick up on the point about harnessing undergraduate students' work. I'm very keen on this and I'm involved in lots of projects at Chester which are on a local level. But really I think what you're talking about is more of a sort of national and international level. People have talked to me about the sort of ethical issues of involving students where the work is being assessed. I wonder if you've got any thoughts on that. Ethical issues around the assessment in what sense? Well in that you're requiring them to do this if it's being assessed and should you be requiring them to make that effort in that way I suppose. I don't have a problem with this with myself but other people do so. Yes. I can imagine that there's a cloud of ethical issues around that which we could explore. We require students to do things as part of the contract of being there. So I suppose in one sense whether you're doing that as private more isolated work or whether you're doing it as public collaborative work is immaterial in that sense of there being a requirement anyway. There are certainly some issues around it. The more that you make the work public and the more deeply people begin to collaborate, how do you begin to identify the individual contributions. There's certainly another factor that's relevant which brings into play the different frames that apply in the university context as to what the purpose of the education is. From my perspective but I would say that and it's one perspective. If you're releasing this cognitive surplus and channeling it towards social benefit that seems to be an inherently good thing in of itself and so I'm in favour of it but I recognise there are different ways of looking at it as well. I'm afraid we have to stop at that point because I know there's a lot of people still with questions and perhaps you can talk to them afterwards. We thank them again for a fascinating talk.