This week, I've been in Leeds attending the 4th International Conference on Online Deliberation where I presented a paper with Chris Reed entitled "Mixed initiative argument in public deliberation" (also co-authored by John Lawrence; PDF coming soon).

This paper presented two of ARG:Dundee's latest tools: OVA and Arvina, a Google Wave gadget that allows a dialogue to be carried out between real and virtual participants. The core theme was the use of these tools in the context of public deliberation, and how old arguments can be used to create new dialogues.

Prior to the conference, I attended the associated Online Deliberation: Emerging Tools (ODET) workshop, organised by Simon Buckingham Shum. Here, I also presented OVA and Arvina, but with more emphasis on the tools themselves, rather than the theoretical justification for them. This was the first workshop I attended, which also presented the first opportunity to meet many of the names I had heard from others in the ARG:Dundee group, or read as authors of papers.

The main outcomes of the ODET workshop were a series of challenges related to argument visualisation, specifically argument maps. To a certain extent, the problem is addressed by Arvina, in that it removes the direct view of the map, and instead presents it in a dialogical form. However, this doesn't solve the problem faced by those who do actually want to visualise an argument.

All-in-all, it was an enjoyable three days that introduced me to the world of conferences.

The slides from my ODET presentation are available here*; the conference slides will be available shortly via the OD2010 site.

*It should be noted that I'm a "PowerPoint minimalist", preferring to use slides to seed and/or illustrate what I'm about to say. But you should still get a rough idea of what's going on!