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Projects

Hi! Let’s be creative about being reflective, as individuals and as groups. Learn more about the projects I’ve worked on that share this goal:




Living Voters Guide: Toward meaningful collective deliberation

The Living Voters Guide brings voters together to discuss and integrate their perspectives, in contrast to our media environment of divisive soundbites. It is a voters guide that is co-created by everyone who participates. It evolves as citizens consider the tradeoffs for each measure.

The core interaction centers on the construction of a pro/con list for a decision that is to be made. Each participant fills out a pro/con list. They can add their own, as well as drawing on the points that other people have added. Over time, the most salient points rise to the top by being included in many positions. Participants are also invited to take a stance on a continuous spectrum from support to oppose. After submitting their stance and their position, participants can explore the stances that other people have taken.




Reflect: Helping the web listen

Listening is not just hearing. It includes listeners giving evidence that they are understanding; nods, restatements, cocking the head. Web interfaces do not support this aspect of listening very well. It is far easier to speak into the web than to actively listen through it.

Reflect helps close the feedback loop between speakers and listeners by introducing a space for bulleted summaries next to every comment in a web forum. Any reader can become an active listener by adding a bullet point that summarizes something that a commenter was trying to say. These restatements are viewable by everyone. The original commenter is able to clarify whether the summary is accurate.




Flash Volunteer

Flash Volunteer seeks to build community and increase volunteerism in Seattle through the creation of a sustainable, user-friendly online platform to connect, inspire and mobilize volunteers to effect meaningful change on a neighborhood level.

I’m helping out as the CTO of Flash Volunteer. This is not an academic project. But I believe that platforms for supporting community work is incredibly important for creating the conditions for positive deliberation.

Past Projects




Deliberation and Work Recognition in Wikipedia

Wikipedians share no less goal than producing a comprehensive account of all human knowledge. And its become an important information resource.

As the community and corpus have grown, complex relationships of cooperation, coercion and control emerge as participants add, remove, and organize content.

I’ve done some computational social science research on how deliberation occurs in Wikipedia and how work is recognized. The core mode of inquiry is to data mine

and qualititatively investigate instances of specific practices that have become important in Wikipedia in order to understand the community. Two such practices have been central: use of policy and barnstars.

Wikipedia’s body of policies have evolved to embody principles and best practices; they get
cited and hyperlinked to all the time during discussions. At the core of Wikipedia policy are deliberative norms like consensus-seeking and assume good faith.
Wikipedia may be the best example of an online space where people can get a proper civics lesson — that is, learn how to constructively disagree with others.
Not only are Wikipedians writing an encyclopedia, but they are collectively learning how to collaboratively write an encyclopedia. By tracking and interpreting the use of policy
in discussions, we have been able to better understand how the central concerns of the Wikipedian community have changed over time.

Barnstars are tokens of appreciation that Wikipedia editors give to each other in appreciation of work that they are doing. They are usually some image and personalized text.

Imagine if this type of practice were more widespread in our everyday life: showing our appreciation of others’ work. We datamine barnstars to
identify the distribution of valued work in Wikipedia.




UrbanSim

UrbanSim is designed to help in the analysis of various policy alternatives for urban development through a simulation system that
models the interactions between land use, transportation, employment and household choices over a span of twenty to thirty years.
As such, it provides a foundation for discussion, counteracting typical deadlock when planners and politicians disagree on base
truths. Currently, UrbanSim is used nearly exclusively by members of Metropolitan_planning_organization metropolitan planning organizations.

This is a project that my advisor Alan Borning started working on in 1996 with collaborator Paul Waddell in Urban Planning (now at Berkeley).

7 Comments →
  1. Brent Allsop permalink

    Hi Travis,

    Very interesting set of tools, ideas, and work.

    I wondered what you thought about what we are starting with canonizer.com in accomplishing some of your goals like living voters guide.

    Brent Allsop

    • travis permalink

      Hey Brent, thanks for pointing me to canonizer, it looks like a promising project. Here’s some feedback.

      The call to action is a bit unclear on the homepage (lots of text).
      The value proposition should be made clearer; in the Living Voters Guide, we wanted to nudge people toward engaging arguments and people that represented diverse perspectives, so our design emphasizes representing pros and cons for different issues in the same place. In canonizer, you seem to want people to go off into separate “camps” in order to express their views amongst like-minded others. If that is the value proposition, you might consider making it more prominent.
      What are some of the proposed use cases for canonizer? Is it to be deployed for some specific debate? In a region? Or is it a one-stop, ever open website for expressing opinions on anything? If its the latter, you’ll probably want a better method of browsing.

      Hope that helps, and good luck!

      • Brent Allsop permalink

        Hi Travis,

        Thanks for this very valuable feedback.

        The value proposition is basically large crowds communicating concisely and quantitatively, about what they think value, want, and so on. When you think about it, most of the problems in society, on the internet, and so on, the problems you are working to solve, and so on, are only a problem because of our complete inability for large crowds to communicate concisely and quantitatively.

        An example being the issue of global warming. Many people claim there is a ‘scientific consensus’, but many people also doubt such claims. If you had the ability to rigorously measure for scientific consensus, then nobody could doubt the rigorous numbers, if the really did exist.

        Typically, in any crowd, there are a set of moral experts that know much better than everyone else. However, since these experts are in the minority, the noisy crowd usually drowns them out, resulting in a kind of mistaken crowd insanity. Controversial theoretical fields such as theories of consciousness are particularly prone to this. Most all moral reasoning fields suffer from this. The value proposition is for experts to use this tool to help communicate to the rest of society, and amplify the wisdom of the entire crowd.

        This system allows these moral or scientific experts, to collaboratively speak in a unified voice, using consistent language, so they can be heard above the very noisy and mistaken crowd. The consensus building canonization process amplifies the moral and scientific expertise and wisdom of the crowd, and raises everyone up to beyond the level of the experts.

        The goal is the opposite of ‘wanting people to go off into separate “camps”’, it is to build as much consensus as possible. Whenever you split into camps, you lose consensus, and influence on the system, so we leverage this fact to reward people to build as much consensus as possible.

        Normally, when there is consensus, the conversation completely stops. In today’s world, you aren’t expected to publish the same paper, or send the same post, if you agree with someone! That’s the problem. Inevitably, there is some lesser important issue, where you can find some disagreement, and this is where everyone wastes all their time responding and counter publishing, in eternal, yes, no, yes, no assertions. Canonizer.com enables people to find the most important issues, where there is the most agreement, and the focus and consensus and ability to communicate such to the rest of the crowd, stays at that level, while pushing the lesser important issues out of the way, into supporting/competing sub camps.

        Communicating all this to everyone, especially the majority of the crowd, that can only think hierarchically, and is only interested in what they think, or what their leader thinks, never wanting to listen to, even wanting to sensor and destroy everything else, is the biggest problem.

        Thank you so much for the very valuable feedback. Perhaps you might be interested in helping us rework some of this too much text stuff a bit? We are working in a crowd sourced model, much like Wikipedia. The difference is, we offer ‘shares’ of canonizer.com for any time spent contributing to the value of the system, improving the browsing methods, and so on. (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/4 for more info and disclaimers.) We are always looking for partners interested in taking anything like this, or what you are working on, to the next level that could radically improve the morality of the world and make gazillions of $$ while doing so.

        Brent Allsop

        PS: I am never anonymous.

  2. rg permalink

    I am a new mediawiki developer and I could use some help. I am creating an etxtension that allows users to add images to a page that they are editig by searching through exsisting images or uploading their own. Would you be able to a=either help me or refer me to someone who can?
    Thanks!

  3. David F. Choy permalink

    I just finished reading your paper linked from the crowd research blog. This is amazing. How can we bring is to Maryland? My phd research in crowd decision making will definitely value the findings from your paper. I’m creating a like service, but not necessarily for bills, that should help people “vote” on rules for a forward chaining system. I’m interested in your thoughts once I’ve clarified my research proposal further. Again: your work on considerit is inspiring. Thanks for sharing the paper.

    • travis permalink

      Hey David,

      Great to hear!

      What do you mean by bringing to Maryland? I’m currently working on a general purpose, hosted version of ConsiderIt. I can keep you in the loop when it’s ready, if you want.

      I’m also happy to discuss your research at some point in the future when you’d like feedback. Just send me an email.

      • David F. Choy permalink

        Great. I’ll keep you in mind when I’m done with my ever changing proposal – but until then, yes – I’m very interested in seeing how considerit could work with Maryland bills. I know a few delegates and non profits – not sure if I could get the kind of sample you got, but I’m very interested in figuring out what needs to happen – to make it happen. Do you have a general purpose considerit ETA?

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