The Internet: Issues at the Frontiers

Tools

Canvassing the various tools out there for Internet-assisted debate and discourse. Could be anything from a Facebook group, or Mind Manager mapper... still in the formative/brainstorming stage, please add. Mchua

Specific tools

• http://www.debategraph.com - lets people map out arguments
• http://am-crt.amthinking.net/crt/berkman/login.php
• lingobot by gregdek - realtime irc translation via google translate
• gobby - great for transcriptions (used in Wikimania '06)
• http://thinkature.com/
• http://vyew.com

General classes of tools

• chat/IM (many-to-many, many-to-one, one-to-one, private backchannels, discussion bots - we use a triagebot to keep some software dev discussions on track at OLPC - how privacy/logging of conversations affects what people say)
• wikis (how various features affect the type of discourse/usage)
• mailing lists (interesting: how their usage changes when they're bidirectionally synced with forums - this happened at OLPC)
• forums (see above on mailing lists)
• videoconferencing
• virtual layers atop physical spaces (for instance: one of the most fun presentations I've ever done was when I made my vyew slides live-editable by the audience during the talk ... Mchua)
• translating services (see gregdek's lingobot, above)
• relay services for the disabled (example: deaf person types or signs via webcam to interpreter who speaks into a telephone, listens for response, then signs/types back)
• audio layers on top of online games - talking with your World of Warcraft team during a strike, etc.

Ideas to discuss

• anonymity - "on the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog." Or tall, or 12 years old, or a hairdresser by day, or a lesbian, or in India, or with a harelip, or... but also: now that we can't filter by that by default, what do we filter by? Do we now bias towards good writers - and what of people who communicate best non-verbally?
• Where does the information for/during discussions come from? Interfaces/ease-of-access/digestibility of information affects how quickly it can get injected into conversations? (examples: hitting wikipedia in the middle of a dinner discussion, calling an expert friend or hitting another IRC channel to answer a quick question, etc). How does this affect how people prepare for conversations? (If you can easily look up notes during the meeting, why take them down beforehand?) Trying to apply some thoughts about info access in libraries to this.