During Cyberweek, the Debategraph team, students at UMass, Amherst, and anyone who would like to join us, will build interactive map of the legal debate around Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (click on the image below to open the map):

The approach builds on the three-fold perception that:

(1) Contentious and complex debates and dialogues can be mapped comprehensively so that all the pertinent issues, positions, arguments, evidence, and scenarios can be represented in a single, transparent and coherent visual structure—by breaking down the subject into meaningful parts; identifying the relationships between those parts; and presenting the parts and their relationships visually.

(2) The internet can be used to open up this process to the collaborative editing, collective intelligence and critical review of a dispersed community – with every aspect of the content and structure of the map like a wiki: always provisional, mutable, and open to continuous improvement and evaluation by all members of the community.

(3) The evolving maps can be shared and embedded across the web (on sites that accept an iframe) – wherever the dialog is occurring – so that changes to a map on any site will be immediately reflected across all the sites on which it appears.

You can move around the map by clicking on the coloured spheres. Clicking on the smallest spheres takes you deeper into an argument, clicking on the largest sphere takes you back up the map.

Log-in to edit the existing arguments, addnew elements to the map, and to rate the merits of the different issues, positions and arguments – which you can do by clicking on the arrows that connect the spheres. The thickness of the arrows changes as the ideas are rated, to signal which ideas are perceived to be strongest (thicker) and weakest (thinner) by the community.

You can learn more about how the map works by clicking on the Help tab – and if you have any questions or comments about the process please don’t hesitate to post them as messages on the map or in the Cyberweek Forum.