This is a follow-up to a post last month on government initiatives with social media. Using Debategraph.org (a wiki-based visualisation tool for debate and critical thinking) David Price has mapped (at the request of a Richard Stirling who works on the POI in the cabinet office) the Power of Information Taskforce Report. It’s impressive – not least because it can be re-used/embedded in various platforms – as it is here.

Having to register with debategraph is definitely a disadvantage and a disincentive. At least with the initial consultation process the POI draft was commentable without registration. It’s RSS feed were another strength. The map below doesn’t seem to allow that level of ganularity – but it does have a visual strength in its being non-linear. I wonder if its likely to throw up different types of comment – whether it actually does promote the kinds of critical thinking claimed for it.

Also the connections it offers beyond the report itself to other reports/debates is potentially very valuable. Maybe this will be the style for some future public consultations …

http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=14255&d=2&i=1

Update 14/04
There is a high level of granularity and detailed viewing of the document through the - though I suspect it is pretty daunting for all but the most enthusiastic advocate of this type of ‘interaction’ with ideas.

Two other tools being used in the attempt to increase participation, collaboration and exploit crowdsourcing – especially in the domain of e-government intiatives are:
google moderator: this was used in Obama’s Open for Questions initiative
DeepDebate: a tool to ‘encourage conversation’. Significantly, this is based on a model of rhetoric that I came across in many of the textbooks for teaching academic writing, most of which were written in the US. ‘Thesis, antithesis, synthesis’; topic sentence + supporting sentence(s) + appropriate connectors. So, the tool embeds a model – I’m not sure yet how subvertible it is – which influences the ways the debate is conducted as well as the possible outcomes. ‘For or Against’, Winner or Loser’? … And the grey areas? The win-win?

No doubt there will be more of these tools emerging in the next few months. Governments in the US and UK are pouring money into initiatives to increase citizen participation (more on the re-branding of political participation as ‘citizen participation’ in a future post). Richard Fahey on governingpeople.com:

The first round of pilots was announced earlier this week. Ten councils were allocated a share of £620,000 in order to make it easier for citizens to access their local council services. A full list of the successful councils is available at Communities.gov.uk