GK,

Thanks indeed for your response.

A couple of clarifications:

You write: "I am generally familiar with the Compendium Institute and the
Visualizing Argumentation technology branded as Araucaria so I am guessing
that you are approaching from that direction."

My question was really just a general one, not from any particular
perspective. I didn't have a point about Compendium, although I make a
couple below, since you mention it in your post.

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"You and I might differ on the relevance of the underlying argument
interaction model but the idea of mapping conversations is something that
we are very interested in ourselves. The difference would be that we
believe in innovation behavior change rather than circumventing that change
with technology. In our model mapping arguments would be the before
picture, not the after picture, but hey that is a conversation we could
have some time."

Actually, your parable about the carpenters is a nice analogue to our
experience with Compendium. Argument mapping doesn't describe what
Compendium is about, though it certainly arose from that discipline (and
still happens to be a good tool for that). Argument mapping (also known as
issue mapping, or dialog mapping) is a great technique, but only one of
many that can be used with Compendium. There are some in the Compendium
community who center their use around it, but it isn't necessary to do so,
and I don't do so in my own practices. Without getting into a long
discussion here, I'll just say that Compendium would be better
characterized as providing the ability to interweave many different kinds
of representations, and to reuse and repurpose knowledge elements, at a
granular level, over time (including the ability to rapidly manipulate
them, for example in a live session). There is more information on this at
www.compendiuminstitute.org.

From my personal viewpoint, characterizing Compendium as a technology is
kind of like characterizing filmmaking, or a musical instrument,  that way.
I view it more as a media form, with its own set of expressive
possibilities that we're just beginning to explore (and that may result in
an evolution to something completely different or better). Part of my own
trajectory in working with the tool and techniques over the years has been
a pulling-away from the limitations of a point of view that says that
because something is software, it should be viewed as "technology" with a
prescribed set of methods and applications. Probably movie cameras were
seen that way in their early days as well (a technology to do motion
capture of horses running?), but people learned to do a lot of different
things with them.

=====

"As you know, there are many technologies around in the marketplace today
that have been designed to circumvent rather then change default behaviors.
There is nothing particularly new in that idea. What would be newer would
be to see how the tool and some of accompanying visual logic transports to
the domain of innovation behavior intervention and change."

That would be great. It would be terrific if people doing innovation
behavior intervention and change work found ways to make use of the tool. I
think there is some possibility there. In our work with the Center for
Creative Leadership, as well as our earlier participatory design and other
facilitative work, fostering behavior change in the direction of listening,
open-mindedness, and collaborative sense-making has certainly been part of
the mix.

Al