Tuesday, October 23, 2007

In honor of Blog Action Day

I missed the original call for Blog Action Day, which was sponsored to "get blogs posting about a common cause: the environment." But better late then never, here's a small contribution.

Today's a work day so I don't have much time to put together a good post, but I'll say a bit about how Compendium relates to the collective effort to reclaim our environment from the forces of destruction and chaos.

Compendium was founded on the idea that it is possible for groups of people to come to grips with complex issues, to look at problems from multiple perspectives. The core idea is that you should be able to ask questions about anything, no matter how monolithic it looks from the outside. Any thread of an issue or debate can be explored, and the discussion around that exploration can be highlighted and focused in its own "space" (a map) without losing the connections to all the other discussions that include that thread. A Compendium project is designed to contain all the many and manifold perspectives and connections on complex issues, giving all a voice and a way to express, query, and explore all of the facets.

No issue requires this kind of multi-perspective analysis as the environment. Science, public policy, economic interests, social impact, personal relationships -- all are involved. Many of our adopters have used Compendium to help explore environmental issues in many different ways. Ricky Ohl's work on mapping public consultations on environmental atmosphere issues in Australia is just one example.

We hope that we can make Compendium useful to many more people and groups attempting to understand, get consensus, and act on environmental issues.

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