THE HYPERFORUM CONCEPT: Using The Web to Promote Deliberative Discourse

A Hyperforum fosters deliberative discourse by being:

• Based on written statements and commentary, not a "Chat" zone.
• Decentralized and Non-real-time.
• rich in information and interpretations, highly crosslinked internally
• Identified with a sponsoring community of concerned participants
• Individually accountable, with no anonymous participation.
• Led by respected Facilitators drawn from the sponsoring community
• Aimed at producing consensus actions, not just discussion

A Hyperforum includes:

• signed pages by multiple authors including divergent views and conclusions
  
• signed commentary by multiple participants, directly linked to authors' material.
  
• visual displays of information, of HyperForum structure, and of the structure of participant interaction
  
• Practical means for: creating and posting commentary linked thematically; for searching data bases; for navigating the site
  
• Online archives of all commentary and content

A Hyperforum is most appropriate for deliberative discourse with the following attributes:

• Where complex and information-rich topics involve opinions and subjective judgments that are important, as well as facts.
  
• Where the objective is to promote consensus, or at least develop a collective understanding of the basis of differences in individual views.
• Where there is an interested and decentralized community of potential participants united by a common desire to find practical solutions through deliberative discourse.
  
• Where the community has access to Netscape or other web browsers and is comfortable with their use.
• Where there are individuals known to and respected by that community suitable and available to be facilitators (moderators).
  
• Where the community likely will respond to an interactive, task-oriented structure rather than passively browsing.
  
• Where significant amounts of validated databases and authored projections are available, or can be commissioned, and there are resources available to put them in useful online form.
  
• Where a viewable archive of the content and commentary of the Hyperforum will be of value.

The biggest event of the second half of the 20th Century has been the sudden end of the confrontation between the US and USSR. World War 3 did not happen.

New communications technology helped enable this peaceful transition. From battery-powered transistor radios, to broadcast TV, to fax machines , communication technology has been too vital for rulers to ignore. But, despite the best efforts of secret police everywhere, it proved to be the ultimate source of seditious attitudes and feelings as brainwashed billions learned about a different “outside” world. The Soviet obsession with controlling the printed word was well founded. Indeed, the global breakdown of governance now unfolding flows from the same wine. All governance has rested to some extent on “Belief Control” and suppression of opposing beliefs. All systems of governance -- even our most enlightened one -- must evolve to be stable in the presence of an extraordinary range of information, misinformation and disinformation.

The abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union was the most dramatic example of the diminishing power of central governments worldwide -- but, analogous patterns characterize contemporary America, Western Europe, China, Africa, Central America, and Japan. The prevailing global trend now is strongly toward dispersion of authority and responsibility downward and outward. Decentralization, as manifested by privatization of traditional government functions, downsizing of large corporations, and growth of small enterprises worldwide, generates an increasing need for increased two-way communication,

Dispersed, self-organizing leadership on an unprecedented scale is required in the post-Cold War world. There is the necessity to go beyond just interacting to the enhancing of positive relationships and problem solving. Communities must offer members bonding beyond shared materialistic needs. They must incorporate subjective values. There is a uniquely modern need to reinvent community with each generation--the consequence of the unprecedented rate of social and economic change driven by accelerating technological change.

A primary contemporary need therefore is to help individuals in all walks of life to collectively envision and deliberate about the range of future possibilities, including the likely outcome of “business-as-usual“ as well as more radical approaches. This is necessary in order to create a greater willingness to accept change and increased responsibility for the future, and thus, to allocate public and private resources more for future good and less for immediate consumption. The Hyperforum concept was invented to some extent specifically in response to my frustration with the inability of current academic and policy institutions (and their inhabitants) to deal with such issues that transcend political and corporate time scales.

3.2 Communities, Communication and Social Cohesiveness

John Gardner has singled out the unifying notion of "community" as the key to viewing social and individual behavior generally (e.g., “Building Community”, published by Independent Sector, Washington, DC, 1991 and Chapter 11 of “On Leadership”, The Free Press, New York, 1990) . At the most basic level, members of any community are fundamentally bound by shared values and a sense of mutual responsibility.

Face-to-face communities (the family, extended family, school, neighborhood) are where individuals first learn these shared values and mutual obligations. As individuals mature they identify to varying extents with larger, dispersed communities-- professional and economic, recreational and sports, ethnic and religious, political and geographic, social and "moral". However, for communities to be harmonious externally as well as internally they must provide not only a sense of belonging and wholeness for their members, but incorporate and tolerate diversity as well.

Leaders need to receive feedback from community members. Hence, the importance of interactive communications. Interactive links are needed to bind communities large and small, nearby and remote, familiar and strange. It is especially important to find ways for new technology to help promote consensus on complex issues encompassing many different communities, and points of view. The Hyperforum project thus addresses a central contemporary need.

3.3 Societal Impact of Broadcast Radio and TV

Technological and economic growth since 1961 have created an intense and all-pervasive media immersion for Americans. Hardly anyone can escape it. But the information content in this deluge seems proportionally much smaller than when TV first blossomed in the 1960s. Local television programming has been mandated at the expense of network programming. “Narrowcasting” has vastly expanded distribution capacity through cable channel that now far exceeds the economic capacity to supply quality programming. Experienced professional journalists like Cronkite, Severeide, Huntley and Brinkly have been succeeded by “Happy Talk” announcers pandering to us on nearly every “News” show. The popular “Docudrama” -- sometimes also hyped on “news shows” -- further blurs the viewer’s distinction between fact and fantasy. The popular TV “Magazine Format” fuels the demand for, and dignifies, celebrity-oriented tabloid journalism in television, as does every flavor of television Talk Show.

Can new, interactive electronic technologies offset this electronic Dumbing-down of America? New technologies inevitably pose the Faustian dualism to help or to harm the body politic. For example, high tech exploitation of conventional telephone and cable connections to homes can facilitate the instantaneous assessment of opinions. Could such new capability drive our governing system so overwhelmingly by short-term mass opinions as to render it incapable of sustained actions toward essential long-term needs? A Representative Democracy, which traditionally incorporated time for leaders and citizens alike to evolve attitudes and to compromise, may not survive in the face of instant polling and publicizing of those instant opinions. Gardner’s "Wholeness incorporating Diversity" may be difficult to sustain in such an era.

The Markle Foundation accordingly has devoted substantial resources for more than a decade to probing the potentialities of new electronic communications and their potential impact on voting, polling, equitable access to information etc. (REFERENCES THIS VOLUME??). Our Hyperforum study seeks to explore the opportunity for enhancing the development of informed opinion on complex issues through innovative use of rapidly growing web capabilities.

3.4 Essential Role of Deliberative Discourse in a Democracy

Lloyd Morrisett has stated especially clearly the need for deliberative discourse in his 1995 President’s Essay entitled “Habits of Mind and a New Technology of Freedom”. (1994-5 Annual Report, Markle Foundation, New York). “Democracy, government by the people, rests on the fundamental idea that people as citizens are able to act rationally in their own interests. The habits of mind that we associate with reason and rational thought include study, analysis, reflection, contemplation, and deliberation. Yet, in our day-to-day life, these habits of mind receive little support or reinforcement. After formal education has ended, most people depend on the media for their information, education, and entertainment.” He then quotes Jeffrey Abrahamson, "Deliberation is a lost virtue in modern democracies; only the jury still regularly calls upon ordinary citizens to engage each other in a face-to-face process of debate. Although the deliberative model of democracy survives in the jury, even there it is in serious decline." (We, the Jury, Basic Books, New York, 1994). And, I would note Abrahamson’s analysis preceded the O.J. Simpson Case which defined a new low in the pernicious interaction between television and the jury system in high profile cases.

Morrisett continues by noting that “All the habits of mind that are associated with reason seem to be in decline. Sometimes the blame is put on the educational system, and no doubt the critics of education have some merit in their arguments. Often, blame falls upon our political system with media and ad-driven campaigns, and the imperative of winning at all costs. Citizens themselves are blamed for their selfinvolvement and lack of concern for the polity. While these and other explanations may have some validity, I believe that we must also look to the nature and characteristics of our system of communications to find out what has been happening to us.”

After pointing toward mass broadcasting as a significant part of the problem, Morrisett evinces hope in the promise of the rise of interactive discourse over the net -- specifically e-mail, “The widespread use of e-mail will promote deliberative response over immediate response, and active thought over passive reception”. I think the subsequent explosive growth of the web and its multimedia capability reinforces his optimism strongly. He argues specifically that “Quite simply, written language--print--is often the best way to convey information. A written document can be skimmed or studied closely, and reading something almost always takes less time than hearing it or seeing the idea enacted in images. Complex or abstract ideas are notoriously difficult to compress within the framework and time of a television program. A thought that might be well expressed on a single printed page and easily read in five minutes might well prove to be difficult or impossible to convey in an hour of conventional television. In the world of multimedia the ability to intermingle images and print opens up many new production possibilities, using each medium when it is most advantageous.”

Returning to the basic issue of deliberative discourse, he notes, “Thomas Jefferson was a champion of reason and rationality, but he also lived in a time when the communications system supported the habits of mind associated with reason and rationality. The printing press made books available as well as newspapers and, despite Jefferson's well-known ambivalence about newspapers, he was a strong exponent of a free press. Aside from printed matter, communications took place in face-to-face conversations or through the exchange of letters. As anyone who writes knows, the act of trying to put your thoughts on paper enforces a certain discipline. In Jefferson's time, the mails were slow and we may surmise that special care had to be taken to say what you meant. The necessity of writing, and the slow mail system forced study, analysis, reflection, contemplation, and deliberation.”

Of course we can never bring back to the slower, more patterned life of centuries ago. However, our Hyperforum experiment illustrates how authored “letters” in a novel web format can facilitate modern deliberative discourse on complex public matters in a very decentralized and multiparticipant setting. Thus we aspire to use the web to facilitate “wholeness with diversity”, mindful that the traditional alternative to such functioning diversity in political systems has been tyranny or disintegration.

4. POTENTIALITIES OF THE WEB

The Web is an unprecedented self-organizing, adaptive social phenomenon, growing incredibly fast and evolving its form and substance virtually without any central planning. It is the hottest new communication technology around. It is almost entirely privatized, and is starting to impact nearly every American institution to some extent. Millions of Americans already use this new technology even though it is only about five years old. Most currently young Americans will come to use the web in one way or another within the next 10 years. Nearly everyone will in time. The web is introducing a new phase in the co-evolution of humanity and communications technology.

But, just what distinguishes the Web technically? What makes it so special?

The World Wide Web is an interactive communication system created by the extraordinary confluence of four separate new technologies: (1) The Internet, (2) Affordable personal computers featuring graphical interfaces, (3) Digital multimedia and, (4) Hyperlinking. The unprecedented demand pull of the web, in turn, fuels extraordinary growth in the availability and affordability of the component technologies....which in turn leads to even faster growth of the web!

The growth of the Internet, the seamless linking of existing copper wire, optical fiber, and radio communication networks which enables direct digital communication between end-users virtually anywhere in the world, is a part of the global stampede into integrated digital communications. In 1961 I became a very junior member of the JPL/ Caltech team trying to develop and fly to Mars the first-ever digital camera which would be operated in conjunction with the NASA/JPL Deep Space Net, the first-ever digital communication network. Digital electronics were in their infancy then. In July, 1965, Mariner 4 broadcast a tenuous stream of bits earthward where the 270 foot Goldstone antenna in the California desert snatched them out of the ether and relayed them bit by bit through teletype to Pasadena. To our dismay we discovered that poor Martian lighting combined with camera difficulties rendered the raw images incomprehensible! Three additional days dragged by while exhausted team members invented and applied new digital image processing techniques. Finally, we could release to the three angry television networks astonishing scenes of a Moon-like Mars, quite unlike the habitable world all had expected.

Everything else in those days was analog. Your home television set, VCR, telephone, cable connection, and video camera, if you possess one, still are. But not for long. Arguably the dominant industrial and financial theme of the 1990s is the global integration of communication and media companies and their technological capabilities. These titanic battles for power and control stem from the widely shared expectation of the merging of personal computers with television sets featuring much higher definition screens fed by practically unlimited amounts of dazzling interactive multimedia. Keyboard and the mouse will be supplemented by voice-recognition and easy to use remote controls. Entertainment, news, information, banking, shopping, personal and professional communication, ..even deliberative discourse, all will be available in the home, office, or mobile location, wireless as well as wired.

Today’s Web helps enable this technological revolution as much as it will benefit from it. But hyperlinking , the fourth element of the technological confluence which enabled the Web, (and it’s static analog, CD ROM), may in the long run the most significant to the co-evolution of humanity and communication technology. Hyperlinking is a fundamentally new way to organize knowledge. Information is organized in terms of its connections to other information and context. For the first time in human civilization, knowledge and information (and human conceptual systems) are no longer slaves to serial systems of categorization and storage such as letters of alphabets, or the ordering of Chinese characters by sequence of strokes, or the classification of books by the Dewey Decimal System. Quite the opposite. With the Web and CD ROM, all entries are defined by their links to other entries. Einstein would have been intrigued with this ultimate perceptual relativity.

I am struck by the analogy with how the human brain is organized. But, in the Web individual brain cells are replaced with individual brains!

Regardless of how prophetic feverish these visions of the future prove, the web is already a major element in human affairs and certainly will grow in importance in the coming decades. Thus, it is important that its potential for building informed, deliberative consensus on complex, information-rich topics be explored as we have begun with the Hyperforum project.

5. DENIAL OF THE FUTURE -- THE SUSTAINABILITY EXAMPLE

We chose a difficult and complex topic for our Hyperforum demonstration, Sustainability. Why?

Accelerating technological change is the hallmark of the modern world, transforming life all over the globe almost unrecognizably in just a few generations. Imagine someone during the first half of the 20th Century trying to visualize the second half. Who could have foreseen that World War 2 would be followed by the widespread use of nuclear energy for peace and war, by the end of colonialism and the rise of self-determination, and by the global trauma of the Cold War? No one anticipated then the transforming cultural impact of transistor radios, broadcast television, and networked-computers leading to revolutionary changes in the workplace and in popular culture, nor in the status of women and non-Caucasians, or in individual life styles and beliefs generally. Who could have imagined that the world population would treble, yet the global economy would grow so much faster as to begin threatening the long-term regenerative powers of Earth itself?

Likewise, for us in 1997, it is frustrating and confusing to try to visualize the faceless, uncertain and somehow threatening middle of the 21st Century, the world of our grandchildren. Widespread denial of major transformations in our future by scholars and the public alike is the common response , making our descendants ever more hostages to fate.

Such denial by even those who should be most oriented toward the long-range aspects of our collective destiny was illustrated to me most strikingly at the “Visions of a Sustainable World “Symposium (Engineering and Science, Spring, 1992, California Institute of Technology). This three-day symposium was held in October, 1991 as the centerpiece of Caltech’s Centennial Celebration. I was one of the organizers, working closely with Murray Gell-Mann whose encyclopedic knowledge of the leading scholars in relevant disciplines led us to assemble an extraordinary collection of speakers. We recruited leaders in Population and Demography, Economics, Ecology, Development, Energy, Technology, Governance, and Culture and Ideology as speakers and panelists. In preparation, we repeatedly advised the participants that the focus of the conference was the world of 50 years or more in the future. Major social, political, economic, technological and environmental transformations were inevitable. Indeed, we organized the program around such transformations. What were their speculations and intuitions about the world of their grandchildren? How should we proceed collectively to be good ancestors?

I had long pursued such questions as a personal and sometimes isolated intellectual quest. Now I hoped to encounter integrated insight and wisdom about this threatening future and how we should work to enhance it.

But that was not to be. Most speakers focused instead on near-term problems and circumstances. “How we should prepare for the Rio Conference (the following June)”. ”Why loss of species diversity is a bad thing.” “Graduate Education Challenges in the next 10 years”. “The Current rate of Deforestation is Unsustainable”. “Rapid Population Increase is Undermining Many Developing Countries”. “The Need for More Recycling in Manufacturing”. “We Need to Find Practical Ways to Include the Value of Public Goods in The Marketplace”. Ten years seemed to be the maximum projection into the future for many. Some even stated that today’s problems were so compelling there was no point in looking much further ahead.

I finally realized that envisioning the future collectively was simply too threatening for even this elite group. Doing so forced many beyond their comfortable zones of acknowledged expertise into vulnerable areas of intuition and speculation. So, some choose denial. It was then that I finally grasped that the problem about sustainability was getting contemporary thinkers and leaders to engage it. That realization ultimately led me to the original conceptualization of the Hyperforum project

Conventional economists and business leaders often invoke a modern version of Adam Smith’s (????) invisible hand “The incremental actions of the marketplace ultimately will find practical solutions”. Politicians simply shrug their shoulders and emphasize their impotence to influence large scale processes -- “My job is to practice the art of the possible within the understanding of my constituents”. Such blocking out of the longer-range needs leads to political and economic emphasis on near-term consumption and investments at the expense of long-range investments and policies -- the very opposite of what this and other deficitfinanced societies need.

It is simply too painful for many to acknowledge that the world of our Grandchildren will be as profoundly different from today’s as today is from the world of our Grandparents. Ironically, by not thinking about it collectively we unwittingly make our grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- ever-greater hostages to Fate. Somehow we must find ways to collectively visualize and deliberate over a broad range of future possibilities if we are to work together effectively to avoid the worst and help realize the more desirable by inducing wise near-term actions.

Thus, Sustainability was selected as the topic for the Demonstration Hyperforum because it is really central to our times and especially needs deliberative discourse. At a practical level it provided a broad, enduring and international subject that well illustrated the promise, as well as the challenges and limitations, of the Hyperforum concept.

6. THE EXPERIMENT TO DEMONSTRATE A HYPERFORUM USING SUSTAINABILITY AS THE TOPIC

Our approach was to focus on innovation at the system level in order to facilitate and encourage effective participation. Existing public domain software components were used wherever possible. Thus our achievements are primarily at the system architecture and social computing levels, rather than in construction of specific new tools for comment, navigation, search, and management.

As is common in the development of new technology, our task proved more challenging than first envisioned and took considerably longer. We found it necessary to evolve through two distinct early approaches (Beta 1 and Beta 2) Finally, substantial discourse between previously unacquainted participants took place during the February-March, 1997 period (Beta 3) satisfying one criterion for success.

6.1 Architecture and Organization

Our first two experimental configurations placed the participant "outside" the Hyperforum initially, entering through a gateway (Beta 1) or through a 2-dimensional map (Beta 2). A major innovation for Beta 3 was the realization of the importance of a user-centered architecture from the beginning. (Figure 1) Thus, we created the "Forum" as the central location containing:(1) The latest information and messages from the Facilitator, (2) Direct links to the four main parts of the Hyperforum, (3) Search and Comment tools, and (4) Help. (Figure 3) Upon completing login, the Participant is placed immediately in the Forum to begin the session, and that is where he or she returns each time after visiting other parts of the Hyperforum. We found that placing the user in the familiar Forum right at the beginning reduced orientation and navigation difficulties of the participants.

6.1.2 The Four-Fold Unity: Facts, Projections, Generalizations, Action

The fundamental organization of the Hyperforum evolved into four sequential spaces: (1) "Libraries" of reviewed and authenticated information, (Figure 4) (2) "Scenarios", authored projections into the future under varying assumptions,(Figure 5) (3) “Syntheses”, generalizations drawn from scenario intercomparisons which illuminate the underlying reasons for differences in perceived plausibility and desirability of different scenarios, (Figure 7) and (4) “Actions”, possible near-term endeavors intended to enhance future outcomes for which a consensus has developed. (Figure 8) This pattern moves from verified facts through authored projections, which inevitably contain a good deal of opinion, into generalizations which are largely opinion assembled in value-laden structures, and finally back into discourse over near-term actions.

We conclude that the four-fold sequential organization -- Facts (Libraries), Projections (Scenarios), Generalizations (Syntheses), and Action provides a very useful way to structure discourse concerning contentious issues.

6.1.3 Importance of a Compelling Topic and a Dynamic, Task-oriented Structure

A key requirement for a vigorous Hyperforum lies in choosing a topic that captures conflicting views from the outset. Otherwise, the Hyperforum may degenerate into an elaborate tutorial (which, however, may still be suitable for some educational applications), or leave the participants confused about the purpose. This was a principal finding , although we never completely met that challenge. A crucial companion conclusion is the importance of an "activity centered" design for the system, particularly the user interface.

The site should be designed to facilitate what it is the designers want the participants to DO. For example, in Beta 3 the participants not only were placed in the Center of the Forum, but were encouraged by the Facilitators to focus on specific elements of the discourse with the goal of eventually dealing with some major issue, e.g. Fissioning of the world into Rich and Poor (Figure 8). Our original designs (Beta 1 and Beta 2) were organized around the information that should be in the site, and around our a priori typology on important things we wanted to see happen. (The RAND group were able to exploit the task-oriented participant structure more effectively on their more focused DARPA Hyperforum).

6.1.4 The Non-linear Dynamics of Discourse

From a broader point-of-view, much of our experience can be thought of from the perspective of the "tipping phenomenon" of getting people to engage. The metaphor of fire seems especially appropriate. Its a problem getting the fire to light, and once it is lit, it is a problem to control it. You have to maintain certain conditions to keep it from going out, but on the other hand, stopping it is not always that easy either. And finally, once you have a reliable controlled blaze, using it to do something like cook your dinner is an additional challenge.

We did a variety of things to manage this nonlinear process. The "activity-centered" design makes it easy for the users to do things besides just look around, which lowers the ignition temperature. The Forum helped create a spatial focus (a fireplace) to help get ignition, and also to provide a better handle on managing and guiding the resulting "heat" (The Damper). We also attempted to provided a temporal focus through things like the "facilitators' message of the day"(Figure 3), a clock icon in Beta 2, and by turning what had originally been a four part typology of information into a four-fold agenda or trajectory for the process. Much of what the facilitators did was to try to get things ignited, and then to stabilize and guide the resulting deliberative discourse. Indeed, we actually had to turn off the site to put out the "fire" of determined discourse.

We were surprised at how sharp this nonlinearity was. Much of the art of constructing and operating hyperfora must lie in this challenge of getting people to engage, and then getting that engagement to lead somewhere.

6.1.5 Need for Strong, Interactive Facilitator

In our earliest conceptualizations, we even considered the possibility of structuring an "automatic", algorithm-based facility to organize and summarize the commentary cogently and without bias. Our subsequent experiences demonstrated to all how naive such thinking is. Indeed, we found the role of the Facilitator(s) to be essential to the Hyperforum process. The requirements are similar to those for a good moderator in general but with the additional challenge of motivating and focusing discussion and discourse remotely and asynchronously. Their task begins with trying to stimulate discussion, then trying to focus it, and finally trying to guide it through the four stages of the Hyperforum trajectory. Facilitator bias can be minimized by utilizing Facilitator teams - we used groups of two in Beta 3, which also eases the time burden of daily web interaction. However, this teaming approach requires: (1) a prior personal relationship (2) available time, and (3) a shared commitment to facilitating a stimulating discourse.

Facilitators' tools were available on a restricted page. Prototype tools helped the Facilitators determine website traffic and activity from various IP addresses. The Facilitators need to check the access log daily, which was available to them through a restricted link titled "Statistics", as well as all the recent commentary. The latter was available conveniently to all through the Search tool on the Forum page (Figure 4). In fact, many participants developed the habit of checking the "recent commentary" immediately upon accessing the Forum, and then entering the debate directly.

In Beta 3 we found it very desirable to post a daily "Facilitator's Message" at the top of the Forum (Figure 3). The message served to summarize the commentary thematically, usually directing attention to specific, central comments, and supplying active links to those comments. It also provided a means of moving the discourse through the four sequential stages of the Hyperforum. Finally, the Facilitator's Messages were archived sequentially, also available through the Forum. Hence, participants who missed several days--even one or two weeks--could recapture and retrace the evolving discourse and catch up.

6.2 Nature of Participants and Their Community

A fundamental aspect of any community is each individual's knowledge of the identity of the other individuals composing that community. Of course for the purposes of role playing, individuals may assume psuedo-identities, such as in a traditional masquerade or a contemporary chat room. But for serious, deliberative discourse it is important that each participant feel personally accountable for his or her commentary. Similarly, everyone must be able to know something about the other participants. Thus, there must be a "BIO" section, or equivalent.. (FIGURE 3)Similarly, all scenarios and other contributions must be authored, either by an individual or by an identified group such as the participants and facilitators of a previous Hyperforum.

A subtle but important aspect of the complete mutual visibility of the participants is the increased credibility to all from the active participation of widely-recognized individuals. For example, the frequent and provocative comments by science-fiction author David Brin from the beginning of our demonstration aided significantly in keeping the attention of other participants, including those who follow closely the commentary of others but declined to express their own opinions. (Such "Lurkers" are visible to the facilitators through access to the activity logs.)

6.2.2 Expectations, Motivations, and Community of Participants

A key attribute of a Hyperforum is the nature and degree of cohesiveness of the participants. Our Sustainability Hyperforum demonstration necessarily involved quite a heterogeneous mixture of mainly unacquainted individuals, a far-from-ideal group. They were mainly busy people recruited by the designers on an ad hoc basis and received no compensation or explicit professional benefit for their participation. Some were interested in aspects of computation, others in sustainability, and only a few had a professional interest in both. Not surprisingly, the "drop out" rate was high, usually with press of business as the explanation, but others were frustrated by the clearly incomplete content and/or difficulties with the experimental tools and organization. (Some of these topics are summarized as part of the "Evaluation").

Despite these limitations, the Sustainability Hyperforum Demonstration successfully met its goals and some participants (and also designers) found that even this tortured demonstration added to their individual understanding of how sustainability is viewed by differing groups. About 50 individuals actually posted comments during our demonstration.

Generally, any operational Hyperforum must define at the beginning who is to compose the community of participants, and what are their motivations and expectations from it. Very useful experience with a more sharply focused Hyperforum was acquired by the RAND members of our development team with a DARPA sponsored research demonstration. The topic was evaluation of the DOD Advanced Technology Plan. (URL ????) The participants there were nearly all involved in related matters and mostly participated professionally . As might be expected, this group was able to reach more definitive results and was able to provide more specific feedback, albeit on a much, much narrower topic.

6.3 Key Functions and Tools

Navigation requires a successful blend of a good functional architecture with an intuitive graphical and visualization scheme. Thus we evolved through several distinct navigation schemes, including a 3D pavilion and a magazine-like design. We found the intuitive judgment among the members of the development team varied greatly on the evaluation of what constituted a good visual representation. And our experience with purchased consulting services in this regard did not bring about internal consensus. What helped most was the user-centered concept which was translated into a very simple graphic. This experience suggests that the fundamental basis of a good navigation system lies in the system architecture more than in the style of visual representation (e.g., 2 vs. 3 dimensions ).

6.3.2 Comment Tool

The most common subject of complaint by participants was the comment facility. Clearly, a more useful, easier-to-use Comment Tool really is needed. We went with what was available (HyperNews) with only moderate customization, as a matter of development philosophy. Thus, we learned about the problem, and also did not become entrapped in someone else's proprietary software.

The criticisms ranged from obvious impediments- duplicate password/logins, word wrap, slowness, to more sophisticated desires to see the benefits of email (in one's own environment) combined somehow with the visibility and pluralism of a web site for threading and displaying the commentary. The absence of cut and paste tools was a serious obstacle to the kind of thoughtful quoting, paraphrasing, and linking we sought.

Thus, we concluded that design and acquisition of a much better Comment Tool is the primary structural, software development to make the Hyperforum approach widely useful. After considering the various aspects, the Caltech group has moved ahead to introduce incrementally significant improvements to HyperNews, as well as to reduce other difficulties reported by the participants in our tests.

6.3.3 Other Tools

A common theme throughout this report is the difficulties created by the absence of a "cut and paste" capability within the Hyperforum, and within and without the HyperNews commentary tool. This is a serious system level deficiency that must be addressed in future Hyperfora. Hopefully, some relief may come about through evolution of available browsers, but customization of individual Hyperfora is likely to remain necessary.

Search tools became quite important. We were able to develop adequate search aids for the commentary titles and headings. We did not have tools to search the content of commentary or posted content. Future systems should attempt to provide powerful interactive search and display systems for nearly every facet of the Hyperforum, especially the libraries and scenarios, which should be dynamic, equipped with powerful search tools like those used for data base searching generally.

7. THE OUTCOME AND CONCLUSIONS OF THE EXPERIMENT

Three project assessment criteria were identified jointly by the Project and the Markle Foundation staff in June 1996: (1) Assessment by the development team, (2) Assessment by the participants in the Hyperforum, and (3) Amount of follow-on activity by other sponsors.

The development team indeed judged the demonstration to be successful, and are therefore pursuing follow-on possibilities collectively and separately. And there are many complimentary and supportive messages which evidence positive net assessment by sophisticated participants. Also, the Sustainability Hyperforum did become "self-sustaining" in its later phases, which was an internal criterion for success within our project. Indeed, we had to deactivate the site eventually to silence the most determined participants.

However, those who were too busy, or were put off by the Hyperforum form or substance, or were just not interested, or who did not respond to an e-mail requests for evaluation are not well represented. Such an outcome is nearly inevitable when using diverse volunteers not drawn from some unifying community as participants.

What about criterion (3), follow-on hyperfora efforts under new sponsorship? So far one complete follow-on has been accomplished, by RAND under DARPA support. Another 7-8 possibilities have developed illustrating considerable external interest in a follow-up. However, the absence of downloadable tools, architectural templates and accessible examples is a significant impediment for new developments. A new Hyperforum Resource site we are developing is intended to reduce the barriers in moving from our Demonstration to other operational applications by providing a rich set of “Do It Yourself ” tools, help, examples, and discourse. (http://www.hf.caltech.edu/HyperForum).

7.2 Potential of Horizontal and Vertical Concatenation

It is apparent from our experience that every aspect of the Hyperforum should be iterative and interactive. All views, and projections (like scenarios) not only must be authored, but the authors should be willing to participate in the discourse to modify their scenarios (projections) in response to the discourse. Truly factual material in the Libraries can be discussed as in any scholarly discussion -- based on its consistency and independent sources. But scenarios really are informed opinions and stories to illustrate those informed opinions. In our Demonstration, only one author participated deeply in the critique of his scenario, and who evolved his views accordingly. The absence of serious, flexible participation by other scenario authors probably limited the development of scenario consensus in Beta 3. Conversely, another well-regarded participant who chose to play the Sophisticated Advocate for markets really helped ignite discourse during the Syntheses phase of Beta 3.

Thus, a Hyperforum could be focused on just the development of a set of scenarios based on certain assumptions, to incorporate the deliberative discourse of a group of experts and interested parties. The resulting scenario--no longer the static product of a single author -- along with the commentary and data which led to the final form-- then could become part of the input to a larger topic- -e.g. Sustainability. This would be helped if one of the facilitators, and some of the participants from the first Hyperforum, were participants also in the second. This process would constitute vertical iteration.

Alternatively, the output of a Sustainability Hyperforum carried out with a initial community (Foreign policy experts, for example), could become the input for a second Hyperforum using, for example, economists as the main participants, but including also some of the participants and facilitators from the first Hyperforum for continuity. This process would be horizontal iteration. There are numerous combinations and variations possible which offer ways to increase the "intellectual capital" of a sequence of hyperfora well beyond the capacities of any one cycle of a particular group of participants.

7.3 Educational Applications

The overriding motivation for the development of a Hyperforum has been to engage specialists and opinion-makers in deliberative discourse concerning the longer range challenges facing this and other societies. Deliberative discourse necessarily must take place within a relatively small number of participants. In our demonstration about 50 actually left comments out of a total of about 100 who were persuaded to register. A few hundred would seem to be a practical upper limit for effective participation in a single Hyperforum, at least of the type we have been developing. Using concatenations like described in the preceding section, the number engaged overall perhaps could be expanded to, say, 1000. Subsequent hyperfora could increase the total more or less linearly. This scale of involvement could significantly impact development of enlightened new policies in many areas.

But what about much broader educational impact? How can the Hyperforum concept help more broadly in education, both formal and otherwise?

Uncontrolled, open public participation in a Hyperforum seems infeasible to me because there would not be a cohesive sponsoring and participating community. How would effective facilitators be recruited? How could progressive deliberative discourse take place.?

However, there may be another way to involve many in the dynamics and insights of ahyperfora. The archive of a successful Hyperforum could, in principle, be “re-run” using stored , recreated epochs from successive stages of the completed Hyperforum. If the Hyperforum site, with all the then-extant links, were recreated for each day that a new Facilitator’s message had been posted , it would provide an interesting representation to an after-the-fact viewer of the dynamics and content of that Hyperforum. Indeed, such a “post-production” version linked to a familiar web site might be of interest to numerous other members of the sponsoring community who were not participants in the original Hyperforum.

Much broader educational impact seemingly could be possible if the post-production involved purposeful editing emphasizing the development and consensual progress of a single, critical theme. For example, during our demonstration, I found parts the discourse on Markets and Governance breaking new ground (for me). A heavily edited version of that demonstration might prove to be a useful web-based supplement to a general course I teach involving aspects of the environment, ecology and economics. Better yet, if a Hyperforum were organized from the start with the objective of producing such supplementary educational materials, and the participants and facilitators recruited partly with that aim in mind, powerful and widely available educational materials could result. The sponsoring community (i.e, AAAS, NSF, foundation, professional society, special interest non-profit, regional or municipal policy body) could then post links to such viewable discourses on appropriate web sites.

7.4 Hyperforum Resource Site

To be widely useful, Hyperfora system architecture and principles, software, formats and tools must be easily available and easy to use. One participant referred to the need for "Just in Time" tools available for Non Governmental Organizations to quickly and easily construct Hyperfora for their specific, changing needs. We have had many inquiries from non-profit groups that want to start their own --and would we please show them where to download the software! This experience has led us to create a public Hyperforum Resource Site (http://www.hf.caltech.edu/HyperForum). The objective is to provide a highly visible resource to help to start this process.

The Markle Foundation has supplied modest funds to Caltech for this purpose. We expect that the existence of this public site will lead to considerable sharing of techniques, examples and software. Ultimately, we hope there will be enough, diverse experience so that the requisite customizing may be available commercially in an affordable manner and Hyperforum and other approaches to deliberative discourse will become part of the mainstream of 21st Century communications, community and consensus.

FIGURE 1. HYPERFORUM HOME PAGE

A monotone representation of the introductory screen at <http://www.hf.caltech.edu/hf/>. The circular diagram in the center portrays the HyperForum structure. Clicking the mouse anywhere in one of the five sectors (which are characteristically colored on the actual screen) brings up the initial screen for that sector.

The underlined words (brightly colored on the actual screen) are hyperlinks to subsidiary pages. First time users click on Orientation and Registration (Figure 2). Registered users click on ENTER which links directly to the Forum, the activity center of the HyperForum (Figure 3).

The Final Report hyperlink was added after completion of the demonstration.

FIGURE 2. Orientation and Registration

The sequence of links Your Role through Help provide a short tutorial on using the site. HyperForum and sustainability link to extended definitions of these terms. HOME PAGE returns to the introductory screen shown in Figure 1. REGISTER brings up a self-registration form for selecting a login and password and for providing the new participantÕs name, identification, and e-mail address. That information is automatically incorporated into the BIO page (not shown) which is always available to all participants.

Upon completing registration the new user is connected directly the FORUM (Figure 3.)

FIGURE 3. FORUM

This screen from March 3, 1997 depicts the activity center of the HyperForum which is intended to be the participants Òoffice.Ó New FacilitatorÕs Messages appear every few days directing attention to significant threads of the ongoing discourse and including links to key comments and essays. The Archive of Daily Messages accesses a serial tabulation of previous facilitatorÕs messages, thus providing temporal context for the current deliberations. The two Feedback links at the very bottom enable direct communication to the Facilitator (and to HyperForum project development team for this demonstration).

The seven buttons at the bottom provide direct links to the four main sections of the HyperForum (FIGURES 5, 6, 7, 8) as well as to HELP and SEARCH (Figure 4) and back to the introductory HOME PAGE.

FIGURE 4. SEARCH

A variety of useful search tools developed by the core team are presented on this page which links directly to and from FORUM.

How much of the site have you seen brings up a prototype graphical display based on the site access logs. Show Recent Comments provides a display with links to all commentary posted within the previous three days. This proved to be especially popular with the participants. It was updated automatically each day.

Search Comments by Author, Title and Recent Dates searches appropriately all the commentary headings and then displays links to the actual commentary. All Topics provides the same function on all the topics, as listed in the heading of the commentary. The entire HyperForum can be searched or just one of the four sectors.

Bios originally included all registered participants but was changed after the demonstration was completed to only those 50 or so who actually posted commentary. E-mail addresses there link automatically to message forms which can be sent directly to the individual in question.

FIGURE 5. INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY

Population, Food, Environment, Water, and Energy lead to extensively hyperlinked online tutorials located at the World Resources Institute which were prepared under Dr. Allen HammondÕs leadership. Security leads to an excellent overview article prepared by Dr. John Steinbruner of the Brookings Institution. The other unlinked titles illustrate additional potential categories for such a library.

The library content for this demonstration was necessarily quite limited in scope and diversity of sources. In an operational Sustainability HyperForum much larger amounts of reference materials need to be accessible. In addition a powerful tool for searching that content (not just the commentary headings) is necessary.

The button in the upper right hand corner of the page is a standard link back to the Forum page used throughout the Hyperforum.

FIGURE 6. INTRODUCTION TO SCENARIOS

Global Scenarios links to an extensive set of text and graphs describing and intercomparing 10 very different global scenarios. (See Figure 9). The United States scenario is a text-only narrative prepared by Murray which provoked considerable discussions and re-evaluation of views during the second test in October, 1996.

FIGURE 7. INTRODUCTION TO SYNTHESES

From Scenarios to Syntheses is an essay by the Facilitators posted on 2/17/97 intended to move the focus of the Participants beyond criticism and discussion of the scenarios to elucidating the underlying reasons for disagreement. Co-evolution of Markets and Governance-- Context for the Future, was posted by the Facilitators 6 days later to focus the lively discourse emerging concerning the role of markets. It includes links to key commentary posted by Participants in the preceding days.

The sequence of comments posted is illustrated in Figure 10.

FIGURE 8. INTRODUCTION TO ACTIONS

This figure illustrates the use of frames which, in this case, juxtaposes below the opening Facilitator's essay the top of a HyperNews commentary screen displaying the beginning of a threaded list of the commentary posted in response to that essay. Not shown in this representation are slider bars along the sides of both frames which enable the user to move each set of text up or down for full viewing. Also the boundary between the two frames can be moved vertically.

With this arrangement, the Participant can first read the opening essay, link to Reference Scenario and per capita incomes as background, then scan the list of authored comments. Comments which are made directly on the essay initiate a new thread, e.g. “1. Levers for Change.... “. Clicking on that title brings up that comment in full with a new Response link which can be used to post a new comment on the first comment. The new title is automatically displayed below and indented from the first one, e.g. “1. levers-some thoughts...” and so forth. The small icons just following each number are selected by the Participant to convey the general sense of the message. All such commentary is also available through the links at the bottom of the page, as well as through the SEARCH tool (Figure 4).

FIGURE 9. GLOBAL SCENARIOS PAGE

Ten different authored scenarios are linked to this page. Most are further linked to supporting sources. The first three develop different aspects of the Technology Will Provide Solutions view. The fourth emphasizes the interaction of poverty and environmental degradation.

The integrated set of six projections which follow illustrate and intercompare a broad range of assumptions. These were generously made available in preliminary form by the Global Scenario Group for our use in our prototype.

Each scenario is the subject of a separate HyperNews commentary tool, available in framed format like that illustrated in Figure 8.

FIGURE 10. THREADED COMMENTARY ON SYNTHESES

A portion of the threaded commentary responding to the February 23, 1997 Facilitator’s essay posted in Figure 7. (Altogether there were 120 comments made in the Syntheses phase of the Hyperforum). Each title is linked to the actual comment which, in turn, is displayed in framed format (Like Figure 8) with a new Response link for further commentary.

Each time a new comment is posted, it is automatically forwarded by e-mail to the author of the subject of the comment as well as added to such a threaded display.

APPENDIX A

CONFERENCE ON "THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION ON

FUTURE ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS"

Aspen, Colorado

August 26-29, 1994

Participants

Ms. Edith Bjornson
Program Officer
The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation
75 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10019-6908

Dr. David Brin
801 Calle Santa Cruz
Encinitas, CA 92024-9661

Dr. Annie Cohen-Solal
421 Hudson Street, Apt. 603
New York, NY 10014

Ms. Esther Dyson
President
Edventure Holdings, Inc.
104 Fifth Avenue, 20th Floor
New York, NY 10011

Mr. Charles Firestone
Director
The Aspen Institute
Communication and Society Program
1333 Hampshire, Suite 1070
Washington, D.C. 20036

Dr. John Gaddis
Ohio University
Brown House
2 University Terrace
Athens, OH 45701-2979

Dr. John Gardner
Graduate School of Business
Room L-281
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015

Dr. Allen Hammond
World Resources Institute
1709 New York Avenue, NW
Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20006

Dr. Lloyd Morrisett
President
The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation
75 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10019-6908

Dr. Bruce Murray
California Institute of Technology
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, 150-21 Pasadena, CA 91125

Professor Monroe Price
Cardozo School of Law
55 5th Avenue
Room 527
New York, NY 10003