ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference.
We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.
Global (e.g. organization-wide) patterns emerge from everyday 'local' (i.e. one-to-one or small-group) conversations. The more that people (in interaction) make sense of events and take action in particular ways, the more likely they are to make similar sense and take similar actions in the future. That is, from an informal coalitions perspective, these patterns are not formed by managerial dictat or design but by the nature of the everyday sensemaking that has gone before.
How do chess players make decisions? How do they avoid the combinatorial explosion? How do we go from rooks and knights to abstract thought? What is abstract thought like? These are some of the questions involving the Capyblanca project. The name, of course, is a blend between José Raoul Capablanca, and Hofstadter's original Copycat Project implemented by Melanie Mitchell, which brought us so many ideas. Well, after almost 5 years, we have a proof-of-concept in the form of a running program, and we are GPL'ing the code, so interested readers might take it to new directions which we cannot foresee.