Principal Investigator Thomas Malone
Co-investigators John Sterman , David Karger , Harold Abelson , Peter Gloor , Mark Klein
Project Website http://climatecolab.org/
Global climate change is among the most pressing and important problem currently facing humanity. It is also unique by virtue of being a truly systemic problem of vast complexity: it affects every one of us, and is directly affected by every one of our actions. Like nothing else, dealing with climate change calls upon us to engage in effective collective decision making on a global scale.
The spectacular emergence of the Internet and associated information technology has enabled unprecedented opportunities for such interactions. To date, however, these interactions have been incoherent and dispersed, contributions vary widely in quality, and there has been no clear way to converge on well-supported decisions concerning what actions, both grand and ground-level, humanity should take to solve its most pressing problems.
The goal of this project is to address this important challenge through the creation of a new class of web-mediated discussion and decision making forum, called the CoLab. This system, currently under development, will use an innovative combination of internet-mediated interaction, collectively generated idea repositories, computer simulation, and explicit representation of argumentation to help large, diverse, and geographically-dispersed groups systematically explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concerning systemic challenges.