The Collective Intelligence Dashboard (CI dashboard) is an open online service that provides analytics visualisations for online debate platforms. It is a place in which analytics on conversational and social dynamics can be made visible and fed back to the community for further awareness and reflection on the state and outcomes of an online debate. The CIDashboard website gives an overview of all analytics visualisations we provide, allows to view them individually with demo and own data, to assemble a custom dashboard of visualisations, and provides the information necessary to embed the visualisations or the custom dashboard into other online debate platforms.
CIDashboard uses your data passed to us in the Catalyst Interchange Format (CIF).
Research
The CIDashboard comes from research on Contested Collective Intelligence carried out by the IDea group from the Knowledge Media Institute.
Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) is a specific form of CI that emerges through structured discourse and argumentation. Mostly facilitated by argumentation-based online discussion tools, CCI aims at supporting collective sensemaking of complex societal dilemmas and seek to improve our collective capability to face complex problems by talking to each other and debating online.
One of the key issues shared by most common platforms for online debate is poor visualization. In fact, online debate is still heavily dominated by text-based content, while most online users nowadays wish to have access to easy-to-understand image/video-based content that they can grasp very rapidly and share easily with their peers. Even though, conveying results of online deliberation with effective visualization methods is an open challenge.
How would you visualize what happens in an online community?
How can we make idea and arguments more tangible so that they can be easily grasped, understood and shared?
How do we device intuitive, engaging, interactive visualisations for users to better explore and understand the main content, insights, outcomes and hidden dynamics of an online debate?
The CIDashboard Website is the result of research work aimed at answering those questions. It consists of a new service which supports debate summarization, understanding and sensemaking by providing a variety of alternative visualisations of the state, content and results of an online discussion.
Early user-requirements analysis of existing online community debating platforms revealed that there where the following main issues that we hoped to address:
- Participants struggle to get an overview of what happened in an online community debate. (Who are the key members? What are the most relevant discussions? Etc).
- Participants are rarely aware of other people’s contributions before they contribute to the debate (this also leads to poorly informed contribution and idea duplication).
- Newcomers do not know where to start contributing.
- Community managers do not know where new contributions would be mostly needed (debate management is ineffective because community managers are missing tools to analyse the debate and direct users attention).
- Community managers struggle to summarise the state of a debate to disseminate results and engage new users.
These issues informed the choice of visualisations, analytics and alerts that you will find on the website. It is our aim to provide ’embeddables’ that improve informed participation and the quality of contributions in an online debate site that uses them.
Tech Info
The Collective Intelligence dashboard (CI dashboard) is a analytics visualisation service provider for other online discussion and Collective Intelligence platform providers, such as for instance Assembl – a large scale co-production system, DebateHub – a hub for structured debates, or LiteMap – a debate mapping tool. The communication between the analytics visualisation provider and the platforms is based on a standardised data format – the CATALYST Interchange format Catalyst Interchange Format (CIF). The CIF format is modelled in terms of RDF and is serialised as JSON-LD. It provides a standardised description of online conversations. The CI dashboard uses the CIF data either directly to generate visualisations, or it requests CI statistics from the CATALYST metric service. This services calculates CI specific metrics from the CIF data and provides these to the CI dashboard.
For more info on the Catalyst Metric Service download the Deliberation Analytics Report.
Acknowledgments
CIDashboard Design, Development and Testing was undertaken as part of the Catalyst Project by the Knowledge Media Institute team (Anna De Liddo and Michelle Bachler).
We are also indebted to Harriett Cornish for graphic design.