Condos in a Politics Knowledge Garden

Jack Park jackpark@topicquests.org

Politics + JS Meetup Lori Hsu, Organizer San Francisco, California, 12 July, 2012

© 2012, TopicQuests This work is Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Author’s Personal Journey

Built airplane

Undergrad study: aero eng.

Built windmills/solar homes

Built wind/solar sensors

AI to analyze data

Collective intelligence

Knowledge gardens

It’s a waterfall life…

Politics Gardening

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Thinker,_Rodin.jpg

Where do we go to get and co-create trusted information?

Some Keys to Trustworthiness

• Omni-partisan perspectives are available.

• Co-creation. All can participate.

– Software platform is also open source

• The digital library of co-created knowledge resources maintained by a non-profit public foundation.

– We call that a Knowledge Federation

From the perspective of complexity theory, emergence arises from complex systems that create new properties from “autonomous unities coming together into larger, more powerful unities”

Why Garden?

Olen Gunnlaugson (2011). A Complexity Perspective on Presencing. Complicity, Vol 9, No 1 (2012). Online at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/complicity/article/view/9624/8561

What is a Knowledge Garden?

Federated Information Resources

Condo (Topic

Garden)

Condo (Topic

Garden)

Condo (Topic

Garden)

Collections of participants at topic-centric portals (condos) with all information resources federated

A Knowledge Garden fuses Social with Technical and Political

What is a Condo

• A Social Contract – Sensemaking

• Collaboration • Collective Intelligence

– Discovery – Learning

• User Experience – Epistemic games – Structured conversations – Social gardening

• Tagging • Annotating • Connecting

Federation*

Conversation Tools

Topic Map

Research Tools

Other

Games

* http://www.knowledgefederation.org

Garden Workflow Big Picture

Encyclopedia

World of Information

Sources

•Collect and curate information resources •Transfer them to a Workbench

•Annotate, Tag, Connect ideas at the Workbench •Create summary topics in the Encyclopedia

•Blogs, Reports, Journalism, … •Organize Workbench resources in Topic Map

•Federate, share,…

Topic Map

Workbench

Topic Maps

• A Topic Map is like a library* – A Topic Map is indexical

• Like a card catalog – Each topic has its own representation

• Improving on a card catalog, a topic can be identified many different ways

– A Topic Map is relational • Like a good road map

– Topics are connected by associations – Topics point to their occurrences in the territory

– A Topic Map is organized • Multiple records on the same topic are co-located in the

map

*A library without all the books: a map is not its territory

Towards a Rosetta Stone for Political Discourse for Trust Building

• The term Rosetta stone has been used idiomatically to represent a crucial key to the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognized as the clue to understanding a larger whole.*

• Would a Rosetta Stone for political discourse augment trust building among stakeholders?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rosetta_Stone.JPG

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

–Albert Szent-Györgyi

A Scenario—Federating Disparate Conversations and Discovery

Discovery?

Similar conversations can occur across cultures and world views in politics

Joe is in Medical School studying to be a physician

Joe is preparing for a test on Bacterial Infections

Scenario: Meet Joe

Immune Response

Bacterial Infection

Macrophage

Free Radical

Reactive Oxygen

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Bookmark page with these tags

Annotate page with this idea Use garden condo tools to

record discoveries

Scenario: Joe’s Gardening

Web page discovered by Joe

Sarah lives a healthy lifestyle

Sarah reads that free radicals can cause cancer

Scenario: Meet Sarah

Antioxidant

Free Radical

Bookmark page with these tags

antioxidants kill

free radicals

Annotate page with this idea Use garden condo tools to

record discoveries

Scenario: Sarah’s Gardening

Web page discovered by Sarah

Ben is a cancer patient with recurring bacterial infections

Ben visits a garden condo to research bacterial infections

Scenario: Meet Ben

Ben makes a discovery Ben becomes curious about free radicals—a new concept to him

Scenario: Ben’s Garden Research

Free Radical

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

antioxidants kill

free radicals

The Free Radical tag has created a kind of wormhole (tunnel) that links ideas together. The opportunity is to recognize the importance of those connections.

antioxidants kill

free radicals

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Ben adds a new Connection between

the two ideas

Must Avoid

Scenario: Ben’s Gardening

Ben has an epiphany Sounds like I should not take any more antioxidant pills!

Emergence: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.*

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Olivia is a Medical Doctor interested in immune system subjects

Scenario: Meet Olivia

antioxidants kill

free radicals

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Need to restate this information

“Must Avoid” doesn’t really

convey a proper sense of reality

Must Avoid

Scenario: Olivia’s Garden Research

Olivia visits the garden

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Olivia gets bonus points for justifying her assertion.

antioxidants kill

free radicals

Contraindicates Bacterial Infection Antioxidants

Because

Create a new set of representations by connecting the two core concepts and

explaining the connection Use garden condo tools to

record discoveries

Scenario: Olivia’s Gardening

Contraindicates Bacterial Infection Antioxidants

Scenario: Starting a Conversation

A Challenge is posed to Olivia’s primary

assertion

“Compromised host” as a new concept to be represented in the

garden’s topic map

Use garden condo tools to record discoveries

Scenario: The Conversation Structured conversation responses to the question

antioxidants kill

free radicals

Contraindicates

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Bacterial Infection Antioxidants

Because

Appropriate For

Compromised Host

Use garden condo tools to record discoveries

Scenario: Garden Results Co-created resource in the garden

Use Cases for a Politics Garden

• Resource Collection – Federation

• bring together and organize without filters

• Resource Augmentation – Tagging – Annotating – Debate

• Knowledge Cartography – Connecting resources – Map maintenance – More Debate

• Research Augmentation – Crowd-sourced discovery – Automated inferences /reasoning – Knowledge sharing

Federated Information Resources

Condo (Topic

Garden)

Candidate Federation Architecture

Know New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo Other Topic

Gardens

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo

Political Topic Garden

TopicQuests Garden Topology

IdentiMe

Personal Microblog

TopicQuests Non-Profit

Read Only Bulk User

TopicQuests Non-Profit

API

KG Admin

Free Access User

API

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo Other Topic

Gardens

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo

Medical Topic Garden

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo Other Topic

Gardens

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo

Education Topic Garden

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo Other Topic

Gardens

New Condo New Condo

New Condo New Condo

Other Topic Garden

Support / R&D

Add-On Agents

Knowledge Garden

Knowledge Federation

Server

A Strong Conjecture

• A Knowledge Federation’s topic map provides a Rosetta Stone substrate

– Supports reasoning by analogy

– Quests related to political Issues provide structured collections of justified world views from which to base political decision making

– A well-organized map of the growing territory provides a navigable terrain to support journeys of discovery

Completed Representation

antioxidants kill

free radicals

Contraindicates

macrophages use free radicals to

kill bacteria

Bacterial Infection Antioxidants

Because

Appropriate For

Compromised Host

Let’s join forces to co-create gardens and federate political

conversations

Thanks to Mark Szpakowski , Patrick Durusau , and Martin Radley for valuable comments