From June 30-31, the workshop Arguing on the Web 2.0 took place as preconference to the 8th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) in Amsterdam. Among the invited speakers were Thomas Gordon (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems, Berlin, DE) Mark Klein (MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Boston, USA) and Chris Reed (Argumentation Research Group, University of Dundee, UK). Overarching topics of the meetings were the project of a World Wide Argument Web and an approach which could be titled as „Rational Civics“: the endeavor to enhance large scale deliberation and decision making online.
I tried to connect the different threads of discussion at the Amsterdam meeting in a Dialogue Map:
Click image for a high resolution PDF of the map
The map is intended to be a synthesis to identify common goals and future research objectives. Tags (yellow) are used to represent criteria relevant for answering the initial questions (on the left) and to indicate which of the proposals (more to the right) meet the respective criterion. The map also allows to challenge assumptions behind the different approaches, e.g.: Will more rational or explicit argumentative discourse really lead to TRUTH?
What I haven’t done yet is linking the boxes in the Dialogue Map to the presentations which are listed in the programme. I might do this once the slides are available online.