Notes

sensemaking modeling of dialogue and debate

Research into Collective Intelligence (CI) seeks to develop the conceptual foundations and sociotechnical infrastructures to increase our ability to resolve complex problems by combining individual contributions.

This corresponds with low level—higher order cognition: it is easy to leave traces of low level activity without thinking (e.g. what you view, bookmark or search for), but if a contribution requires a degree of reflection (e.g. an annotation, blog post or document) then this could only be unconsciously part of a collective intelligence if it was made public without the author’s permission.

like wisdom of the crowds? How much is automatic, data mined, and how much is intentional, collaborative? How much do machines think for us, and how much do they help us think for ourselves, or together?

Engelbart (1963): to develop organizational capacity to augment human intellect, our “collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems”, and in particular Dynamic Knowledge Repositories, a component of which captures key elements of the collective dialogue. Our approach defines a class of “augmentation system” to assist “argumentative design”, and other forms of workplace discourse such as modelling.

See review Scaife & Rogers, 1996Scaife, M., & Rogers, Y. (1996). External cognition: how do graphical representations work?. International journal of human-computer studies, 45(2), 185--213.

“The very process of externalizing thought shapes that unfolding understanding: from attempting to verbalize inchoate thoughts, to sketching diagrams, to codifying data in a structured symbol system.”

Weick emphasizes that sensemaking is always in a social context, and cannot be treated as a purely cognitive, information processing challenge: “The point we want to make here is that sensemaking is about plausibility, coherence, and reasonableness. Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially acceptable and credible. […]

Personal intelligence is both the “store” of accumulated memories, plus the capacity to respond appropriately to a situation by transforming memories and new data into plausible narratives about what how the world was, is, or might be

• “Sensemaking is about such things as placement of items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, and patterning.” (Weick, [23], p.6)
• “By sensemaking, modern researchers seem to mean something different from creativity, comprehension, curiosity, mental modeling, explanation, or situational awareness, although all these factors or phenomena can be involved in or related to sensemaking. Sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively. […] A frame functions as a hypothesis about the connections among data.”

• there may not be one worldview subscribed to by all;
• evidence can be ambiguous or of dubious reliability requiring the construction of plausible, possibly competing narratives;
• growth in intelligence results from learning, which is socially constructed through different forms of discourse, such as dialogue and debate

This motivates a tool-design approach focused on the construction and management of connections — between data, knowledge resources (such as documents), ideas (including issues, options and arguments), and people.