Slides presented to the Politics+JS meetup; knowledge gardens for political sensemaking

1. Condos in a Politics
Knowledge Garden
Jack Park
jackpark@topicquests.org
Politics + JS Meetup © 2012, TopicQuests This work is
Lori Hsu, Organizer Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
San Francisco, California, 12 July, 2012 NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

2. 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…

3. Politics Gardening
Where do we go to get and co-create trusted information?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Thinker,_Rodin.jpg

4. 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

5. Why Garden?
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”
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

6. What is a Knowledge Garden?
A Knowledge Garden fuses Social with Technical and Political
Condo Condo
(Topic (Topic
Garden) Garden)
Federated
Information
Resources
Collections of participants Condo
at topic-centric portals (Topic
(condos) with all Garden)
information resources
federated

7. What is a Condo
• A Social Contract
Federation*
– Sensemaking
• Collaboration
• Collective Intelligence
– Discovery Games
– Learning
• User Experience Topic
– Epistemic games Other Map
– Structured conversations
– Social gardening
• Tagging Research
Tools
• Annotating Conversation
• Connecting Tools
* http://www.knowledgefederation.org

8. Garden Workflow Big Picture
Encyclopedia
World of
Information Workbench
Sources
Topic Map
•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,…

9. 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

10. 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rosetta_Stone.JPG
political discourse augment trust
building among stakeholders?
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

11. “Discovery consists of
seeing what everybody
has seen and thinking
what nobody has
thought.”
–Albert Szent-Györgyi

12. A Scenario—Federating Disparate
Conversations and Discovery
Discovery?
Similar conversations can
occur across cultures and
world views in politics

13. Scenario: Meet Joe
Joe is in Medical
School studying to be a
physician
Joe is preparing for a
test on Bacterial
Infections

14. Scenario: Joe’s Gardening
Bookmark page with
these tags
Web page discovered by Joe Immune Response
Bacterial Infection
macrophages use
free radicals to Macrophage
kill bacteria
Free Radical
Reactive Oxygen
Annotate page with
this idea Use garden condo tools to
record discoveries

16. Scenario: Meet Sarah
Sarah lives a healthy
lifestyle
Sarah reads that
free radicals
can cause cancer

17. Scenario: Sarah’s Gardening
Bookmark page with
these tags
Web page discovered by Sarah
antioxidants Antioxidant
kill
free radicals Free Radical
Annotate page with
this idea Use garden condo tools to
record discoveries

19. Scenario: Meet Ben
Ben is a cancer patient
with recurring
bacterial infections
Ben visits a garden
condo to research
bacterial infections

20. Scenario: Ben’s Garden Research
Ben becomes curious
about free radicals—a Ben makes a discovery
new concept to him
Free Radical
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to kill
kill bacteria 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.

22. Scenario: Ben’s Gardening
Ben has an epiphany Sounds like I should
not take any more
antioxidant pills!
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to Must Avoid kill
kill bacteria free radicals
Emergence:
Ben adds a new
In philosophy, systems theory, science,
Connection between
and art, emergence is the way complex
the two ideas
systems and patterns arise out of a
multiplicity of relatively simple
interactions.*
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

23. Scenario: Meet Olivia
Olivia is a Medical
Doctor interested in
immune system
subjects

24. Scenario: Olivia’s Garden Research
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to Must Avoid kill
kill bacteria free radicals
“Must Avoid” Need to restate this
doesn’t really information
convey a proper
sense of reality
Olivia visits the garden

25. Scenario: Olivia’s Gardening
Bacterial Infection Contraindicates Antioxidants
Because
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to kill
kill bacteria free radicals
Olivia gets bonus
points for justifying Create a new set of
her assertion. representations by
connecting the two
core concepts and
explaining the
connection Use garden condo tools to
record discoveries

26. Scenario: Starting a Conversation
Bacterial Infection Contraindicates Antioxidants
A Challenge is posed
to Olivia’s primary
assertion

27. Scenario: The Conversation
Structured conversation
responses to the question
“Compromised host” as a new
concept to be represented in the
garden’s topic map
Use garden condo tools to
record discoveries

28. Scenario: Garden Results
Co-created resource in
Compromised Host the garden
Appropriate For
Bacterial Infection Contraindicates Antioxidants
Because
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to kill
kill bacteria free radicals
Use garden condo tools to
record discoveries

29. Use Cases for a Politics Garden
• Resource Collection
– Federation
• bring together and organize without filters
• Resource Augmentation
– Tagging
– Annotating Condo
– Debate (Topic
• Knowledge Cartography Garden)
– Connecting resources Federated
– Map maintenance Information
– More Debate Resources
• Research Augmentation
– Crowd-sourced discovery
– Automated inferences /reasoning
– Knowledge sharing

30. Candidate Federation Architecture

31. TopicQuests Garden Topology
Medical Topic
Other Topic Other Topic
Add-On Agents New Condo New Condo
Garden
Gardens
New Condo Garden
Gardens
New Condo
New Condo New Condo
New Condo New Condo
New Condo New Condo
IdentiMe
API
Personal
Microblog PoliticalTopic
Other Topic Education
Other Topic
New Condo New Condo
Garden
Gardens
New Condo Topic Garden
Gardens
New Condo
New Condo New Condo
Support / R&D Know New Condo New Condo
New Condo New Condo
Read Only
Bulk User
Free Access
User Knowledge
API Federation
Server TopicQuests
KG Admin TopicQuests Non-Profit
Non-Profit
Knowledge Garden

32. 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

33. Completed Representation
Compromised Host
Appropriate For
Bacterial Infection Contraindicates Antioxidants
Because
Let’s join forces to co-create
macrophages use antioxidants
free radicals to federate political
gardens and kill
conversations radicals
kill bacteria free
Thanks to Mark Szpakowski , Patrick Durusau , and Martin Radley for
valuable comments