What should Obama do next?

Join the conversation about the map on the Independent Minds blog http://davidprice.independentminds.livejournal.com

In the build up to Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, help The Independent tell the world what Obama should do next.

Over the next 10 weeks, The Independent and Debategraph will be building a series of interrelated debate maps of the key policy and political questions facing Obama as he prepares for office.

Whether it’s tackling the global financial crisis, deciding who to appoint to key cabinet posts, or determining how to proceed on climate change, Iraq or the crisis in the Congo, help us develop a comprehensive map of the political choices open to Obama, the arguments for and against, and the path you think Obama should follow.

Each week, we’ll be seeding the maps with an article from The Independent or The Independent on Sunday and beginning to layer in the positions and arguments from the Obama team’s campaign manifesto and public statements.

You can watch the map evolve in the build up to the inauguration, or better still register and begin to comment, suggest new issues, rate the options and arguments, and add new options and arguments of your own.

We’ll expand more on the process over the coming weeks on the Independent Minds blog http://davidprice.independentminds.livejournal.com, but for now we have seeded the opening map with the arguments from Philip Bobbitt’s article The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world (examining some of the international policy options open to Obama), and Leonard Doyle’s Obama Starts to Build a ‘Team of Rivals’ (considering whether Obama should appoint Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State).

The maps express debates in the form of different structural elements and the relationships between them—e.g. arguments support or oppose a given policy position, and policy positions respond to an issue—signalled by the different colours of the spheres and arrows.

To learn more about the visualization, roll over the arrows, spheres and buttons above.

To start exploring the map, just click on a small sphere to explore deeper into the debate, and click on the largest sphere to move back up.

David Price, david AT debategraph DOT org

David is co-founder of Debategraph.org, a creative commons, social venture that combines argument visualization with collaborative wiki editing to make the best arguments on all sides of every complex public debate freely available to all, and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.