Boundary Infrastructures for IBIS Federation: Design Rationale, Implementation, and Evaluation

Climate change is a growing concern to humankind, since the dominant view argues for rapid, significant changes in human behavior to avert catastrophic consequences. This is a complex problem, known as a wicked problem. A productive way forward is through creative, critical dialogue. Such dialogue requires new kinds of socio-technical infrastructure. We offer a socio-technical infrastructure, described as a boundary infrastructure, based on improvements to existing and emerging Issue-based Information Systems (IBIS) conversation platforms. IBIS is an emerging lingua franca of structured discourse. We survey a rich field of literature related to ecologies for human-computer collaboration, conversation, communications theory, scientific discovery, knowledge representation and organization, and software development. Our goal is to facilitate the elicitation of numerous IBIS conversations, seeking a large variety of opinions, facts, and world views; our contribution lies in a process of federation of those IBIS conversations. Our work entails the fabrication of a prototype collective intelligence platform we call Bloomer. Bloomer includes an IBIS conversation federation component, and will be disseminated to several communities of practice, particularly those engaged in activities related to climate change.

Publication(s)

Park, J. (2010). Boundary Infrastructures for IBIS Federation: Design Rationale, Implementation, and Evaluation. Thesis Proposal, available as: Technical Report KMI-10-01, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-10-01.pdf