Tue, 15 May 2012 08:53:35 +0000
Good grief! Who writes this stuff? “Strategy ideation, formulation, and execution is essential for executives looking to drive business in today’s economy. At Columbia Business School Executive Education, we understand this need. To this end, we offer programs that equip executives with a range of tools and frameworks to define and implement their organization’s immediate [...]
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:01:24 +0000
An online survey about climate change by the Australian Broadcasting Commission illustrates the worthlessness of typical online polls. Discerning what the public really thinks is not an easy business. What we need is processes which combine the best of online polling and deliberative democracy. YourView is exploring this space.
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:26:56 +0000
Like Rebecca in her Time Wasters post, I too applied for a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. The bid went in in November 2011, and I had set up collaborations with 4 other academic institutions. Like Rebecca, my bid was unsuccessful. In their response, The British Academy highlighted the high level of competition: One of the [...]
Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:32:11 +0000
The YourView project is featured in today’s Age newspaper. It appears in an innovative journalism format called The Zone. Each “issue” includes lead article, a full interview transcript, a short video segment, and a live Q&A session at midday. The Q&A is conducted at 12 midday through the comments section at the bottom of the [...]
Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:27:45 +0000
I have a short paper appearing next month in the Journal of Public Deliberation. A preview is available here. Below is a precis. In its first half, “Cultivating Deliberation for Democracy” discusses the failure of “deliberation technologies” to substantially improve public deliberation in either quantity or quality. To be sure, new technologies have made possible [...]
Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:49:20 +0000
Two perceptive comments on the state of democracy in Australia, from yesterday’s Age. First Barry Jones laments the dismal state of political discourse: I have been heavily involved in politics all my adult life and the current national situation, both in the government and opposition, is a low point, the lowest I can recall – even [...]
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:47:21 +0000
Head First Rails is the best intro to Ruby on Rails but to work with Rails 3.x it needs the modifications listed here...
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:57:16 +0000
Like our other knowledge cartography software tool Compendium, Cohere is a ‘horizontal’ application: it provides an extremely customizable visual language, and is agnostic as to the user community or field of application. This is what you want from a research platform that can serve as a vehicle for experimenting with new ideas, but the tradeoff [...]
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:47:37 +0000
Life is getting tough in the world of academia, with fewer funding calls and more competition for those that are available. The Institute of Education Technology (IET) is putting in a huge number of bids in January, about 12 I think. Those involved have been working day, night and weekends to get the bids written, [...]
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:26:59 +0000
One of the joys of being a researcher is having the chance to work intensively on a common vision, with someone delightful who brings a sharp mind and complementary approach. In that vein, we had a hugely productive 6 week visiting OLnet Project fellowship with Ágnes Sándor, from Xerox. We are both concerned with the [...]
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:10:36 +0000
We are delighted to announce the publication of a journal paper, in which we discuss the integration of Cohere with the output from the Xerox Incremental Parser (XIP). De Liddo, A., Sándor, Á. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: Rationale, Technologies, and a Human-Machine Annotation Study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. DOI: 10.1007/s10606-011-9155-x http://www.springerlink.com/content/23n1408l9g06v062 [...]
Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:44:41 +0000
A new draft of What Do We Think? Divining the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions is now available. Download PDF
Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:01:41 +0000
List the features you'd want to see in a mechanism for identifying public wisdom. These requirements mean the mechanism would have to be internet based - i.e. a kind of national virtual forum. Such a forum would face a range of major challenges, but there's reason to think these could be handled.
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:10:35 +0000
We need the public wisdom because politically it would help governments make decisions; and on some issues would be the best guide to what the right decision would be. However we almost never know what the public wisdom is. Deliberative polling is our best current mechanism for finding out, but is too cumbersome and expensive to fully meet the need.
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:26:08 +0000
Governments must make lots of decisions for Australia to make a smooth and timely transition to sustainability. Those decisions are constrained by public opinion; therefore we need to know what the public thinks. Standard opinion polls identify the public attitude, which falls far short of the public wisdom.
