David Price
Contents
David Price
Updating the way we think and collaborate
Debategraph is changing our collective mind
Having seen—by serving several terms in cabinet minister posts in Australia—that issues are habitually voted on without being understood, Peter Baldwin retired early, bought himself a home in Australian Highlands, and learned computer programming.
Having received a philosophy doctorate from the University of Cambridge—where Bertrand Russell summarized for us the history of the Western philosophy, and Ludwig Wittgenstein warned us about its limitations—David Price endeavored to revolutionize philosophy by changing our collective mind hands on.
Together, Peter Baldwin and David Price created Debategraph—a technology-enabled prototype of a new collective mind; which enables us the people and any expert team to combine knowledge and ingenuity; and comprehend issues and ceraft solutions together—as Doug Engelbart envisioned.
Debategraph, and David, stand on the shoulders of giants
Theoretically and conceptually, Debategraph belongs to the “issue-based information system” tradition, which was initiated in the 1960s and 70s by Horst Rittel of the U.C. Berkeley and his collaborators; as part of their research on “wicked problems”—the problems that are notoriously difficult to comprehend, or even define.
David is also a leader of Global Sensemaking
David Price is a co-founder and leader of a related project called Global Sensemaking—which hosts a 300-member community of researchers and developers of collective sense-making media. I’ll mention for illustration Jeff Conklin and his book “Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems”—where Conklin explained how “dialogue mapping” computer tools, of which Debategraph is the most widely used example, can be combined with skilled facilitation to transform the usual ‘turf strife’ communication to a collectively creative system, capable of unraveling “wicked problems”.
David is Holotopia's dialog master
David Price has generously offered to guide our collective sense making on Debategraph; which will constitute the core of the Holotopia dialog.
