Stowe and I have had some back-and-forth brainstorms about 'duelling blogs' (see also here), and now some of the hottest people in the 'visualizing argumentation' arena have come along and set up a worthy activity to frame and manage argumentation-and-debate -- deploying some of the latest tools, with GlobalArgument.net as the launchpad. Here's a pointer from today's KMi Planet News.

An exciting new experiment in computer-supported argumentation launched today as the GlobalArgument.net website was published, and the controversial Iraq Debate begins to be mapped. Conceived by KMi's [Knowledge Media Institute's] Simon Buckingham Shum, and co-led with former Australian Cabinet Minister Peter Baldwin, GlobalArgument.net operates around the concept of Argumentation Experiments, in which 'Players' focus on a topic for debate, working from a set of source documents, and to a schedule for modelling, publishing and analysing the outputs.

Experiment 1 kicks off today, and players will be working on the controversial Iraq Debate to the end of May 2005. KMi visiting PhD student Ale Okada will be working with Simon to model the structure of this debate using Compendium, and possibly other tools.

This is a nice thing to see happening. As an example of why this is important, consider the following comment from Doug Engelbart (inventor of the mouse and many other interactive/groupware concepts) in the afterword to the book Visualizing Argumentation:

For five decades I have been driven by an intuitive certainty that computer supported argumentation could increase humankind's collective problem-solving capabilities to a degree that was (is) greatly unappreciated, and that its explicit pursuit should become one of society’s high-priority "grand challenges".