Opasnet brochure

Scope

Opasnet brochure is an easy-to-read promotion leaflet about Opasnet. It should tell the basic idea and major functionalities of Opasnet. The target audience is anyone who hears about Opasnet for the first time and is interested in learning what it actually is and where it can be found.

Definition

It's title should be the main slogan: "Anyone can solve common problems". The title should be described in one paragraph.

It should contain the descriptions of the five main properties:

• Completely open participation.
• Systematic information structure (research questions and attempted answers).
• Everything is subject to scientific criticism.
• Formal argumentation is used to resolve disputes.
• Quantitative estimates are uploaded to a database where anyone can use them.

It should invite the reader to read more from Opasnet and contribute in other ways.

It should tell about some real assessments where the reader can contribute.

It should have a few illustrative figures.

The format of the brochure should be double-sided, colour-printed A4. It should be folded once (to size A5) or twice (height of A5, width 1/3 of the height of A4). It should also be available as a PDF file.

Intarese instructions

Title

Author1, Author2, Author3, Author4

1) Institution name and address 2) Institution name and address 3) Institution name and address 4). Institution name and address

Corresponding author: Name, e-mail address

Keywords: Please identify 3-5 keywords.

Aim: Please kindly keep the total length of Aim and Abstract to approximately 350 words. Font size 12, Times New Roman. Abstract: Acknowledgements:

Please submit your abstract to Dr. Kornelia Jumel (k.jumel()imperial.ac.uk) by 7 January 2011

Result

See the Power Point file for printing out the brochure: File:Opasnet brochure.ppt. The texts in the brochure are presented below.

Anyone can solve common problems

Aim:

To develop a method for organising scientific information and value judgements for improving societal decision-making in a situation where open participation is allowed.

Abstract:

The world is packed with common problems awaiting for solutions - global warming, urban air pollution, contaminants in drinking water and food to name a few. Many people would be willing to make an effort in solving these problems but so far have been lacking practical means to contribute. Open assessment is a method that aims to offer rules and practices for collecting and synthesising information by self-organised groups into useful pieces (or objects) of information. In practice, the work is done using a web-workspace called Opasnet (en.opasnet.org) that is open and freely available to all.

The information needed for making a decision is organised as an assessment that predicts the impacts of different decision options on some outcomes of interest. Decisions, outcomes, and other issues are modelled as distinct and self-standing information objects called variables. In practice, assessments and variables are web pages in Opasnet. They contain all information (text, numerical values, and software code) needed to describe and actually run that part of an assessment model.

Each object (or page) contains information about a particular issue.  Each page also has the same, universal structure: a research question (what is the issue?), rationale (what do we know about the issue?), and result (what is our current best answer to the research question?). The descriptions of these issues are built on a web page, and anyone can participate in reading, evaluating, and contributing just as in Wikipedia. The content reflects the shared understanding by the participating group about the topic. Trialogue is a concept where shared information objects are specifically used as a major means to communicate knowledge between group members. As the group gets larger and the contributions more numerous, the content asymptotically approaches the best current scientific knowledge about the topic. Importantly, the same code of conduct applies to work on all pages irrespective of their maturity.

Inference rules (also called discussion rules) are used to decide what to believe about a topic, i.e. what should be written to its content page. The rules are summarised as follows:

Anyone can promote a statement about anything (promote = claim that the statement is true). A statement can be factual (what is?) or moral (what should be?) by nature. A promoted statement is considered valid unless it is invalidated (i.e., convincingly shown not to be true). The validity of a statement is always conditional to a particular group (which is or is not convinced). Moral statement are only applied within an explicit field, e.g. within a country or within a profession.

Statements can be defended or attacked with arguments, which are themselves treated as statements of smaller discussions. Thus, a hierarchical structure of defending and attacking arguments is created. When the discussion is resolved, the content of all valid statements is incorporated into the information object. All resolutions are temporary, and anyone can reopen a discussion.

If there is uncertainty about whether a statement is true, the uncertainty is quantitatively measured with subjective probabilities. A priori beliefs are updated into a posteriori beliefs based on observations (in case of factual statements) or opinions (in case of moral statements) and open criticism that is based on shared rules. Opinions of each person are given equal weight.

There can be other rules than these inference rules for deciding what a group should believe. Rules are also statements and they are validated or invalidated just like any statements.

  Technical functionalities supporting open assessment

Opasnet is the web-workspace for making open assessments.  The user interface is a wiki and it is in many respects similar to Wikipedia, although it also has enhanced functionalities for making assessments.  One of the key ideas is that all work needed in an assessment can be performed using this single interface.  Everything required to undertake and participate in an assessmeent is therefore provided, whether it be information collection, numerical modelling, discussions, statistical analyses on original data, publishing original research results, peer review, organising and distributing tasks within a group, or dissemination of results to decision-makers. In practice, Opasnet is an overall name for many other functionalities than the wiki, but because the wiki is the interface for users, Opasnet is often used as a synonym for the Opasnet wiki.  Other major functionalities exist as well, aas outlined below. The main article about this topic is Opasnet structure. Most variables have numerical values as their results. Often these are uncertain and they are expressed as probability distributions. A web page is an impractical place to store and handle this kind of information. For this purpose, a database called Opasnet Base is used. This provides a very flexible storage platform, and almost any results that can be expressed as two-dimensional tables can be stored in Opasnet Base.  Results of a variable can be retrieved from the respective Opasnet page.  Opasnet can be used to upload new results into the database.   Further, if one variable (B) is causally dependent on variable (A), the result of A can be automatically retrieved from Opasnet Base and used in a formula for calculating B. Because Opasnet Base contains samples of distributions of variables, it is actually a very large Bayesian belief network, which can be used for assessment-level analyses and conditioning and optimising different decision options.  In addition to finding optimal decision options, Opasnet Base can be used to assess the value of further information for a particular decision. This statistical method is called Value of information. Opasnet contains modelling functionalities for numerical models. It is an object-oriented functionality based on the R statistical software and the results in Opasnet Base. Each information object (typically a variable) contains a formula which has detailed instructions about how its result should be computed, often based on results of upstream variables in a model.   Meta level functionalities

In addition to work and discussions about the actual topics related to real-world decision-making, there is also a meta level in Opasnet.  Meta level means that there are discussions and work about the contents of Opasnet.  The most obvious expression of this are the rating bars in the top right corner of many Opasnet pages.  Peer rating means that users are requested to evaluate the scientific quality and usefulness of that page on a scale from 0 to 100. This information can then be used by the assessors to evaluate which parts of an assessment require more work, or by readers who want to know whether the presented estimates are reliable for their own purpose. The users are also allowed to make peer reviews of pages. These are similar to peer reviews in scientific journals, with written evaluations of the scientific quality of content. Another form of written evaluation are acknowledgements, which are a description about who has contributed what to the page, and what fraction of the merit should be given to which contributor. Estimates of scientific quality, peer reviews and acknowledgements can be used systematically to calculate how much each contributor has done in Opasnet, though these practices are not yet well developed: contribution scores are so far the only systematic method even roughly to estimate contributions quantitatively. Respect theory is a method for estimating the value of freely usable information objects to a group. This method is under development, and hopefully it will provide practical guidance for distributing merit among contributors in Opasnet.   Why does open assessment work?

Many people are (initially at least) sceptical about the effectiveness of open assessment.  In part, this is because ther approach is new and has not yet been widely applied and validated.  Most examples of its use are for demonstration purposes.  A number of reasons can nevertheless be advanced, supporting its use:   In all assessments, there is a lack of resources, and this limits the quality of the outcome. With important (and controversial) topics, opening up an assessment to anyone will bring new resources to the assessment in the form of interested volunteers. The rules of open assessment make it feasible to organise the increased amount of new data (which may at some points be of low quality) into high-quality syntheses within the limits of new resources. Participants are relaxed with the idea of freely sharing important information - a prerequisite of an effective open assessment - because open assessments are motivated by the shared hope for societal improvements and not by monetary profit.  This is unlike in many other areas where information monopolies and copyrights are promoted as means to gain competitive advantage in a market, but as a side effect result in information barriers. Problems due to too narrow initial scoping of the issue are reduced by having with more eyes look at the topic throughout the assessment process. It becomes easy systematically to apply the basic principles of the scientific method, namely rationale, observations and, especially, open criticism. Any information organised for any previous assessment is readily available for a new assessment on an analogous topic. The work time for data collection and the calendar time from data collection to utilisation are also reduced, thus increasing efficiency. All information is organised in a standard format which makes it possible to develop powerful standardised methods for data mining and manipulation and consistency checks. It is technically easy to prevent malevolent attacks against the content of an assessment (on a topic page in Opasnet wiki) without restricting the discussion about, or improvement of, the content (on a related discussion page); the resolutions from the discussions are simply updated to the actual content on the topic page by a trusted moderator. These points support the contention that open assessment (or approaches adopting similar principles) will take over a major part of information production motivated by societal needs and improvement of societal decision-making.  The strength of this argument is already being shown by social interaction initiatives, such as Wikipedia and Facebook,  However, an economic rationale also exists: open assessment is cheaper to perform and easier to utilise, and can produce higher quality outputs than current alternative methods to produce societally important information.

Get involved with Opasnet!

Go see Opasnet at en.opasnet.org and find out how to participate by:

Reading Opasnet content
Commenting Opasnet content
Participating in polls
Editing and creating Opasnet content
Providing data to the Opasnet base
Peer-reviewing Opasnet content
Moderating parts of Opasnet

You can also check out and contribute to the on-going assessments on e.g.:

Impacts of emission trading on city-level
Impacts of heating in small municipalities
Climate change, air quality and housing
Costs and benefits of composite traffic
Benefits and risks of eating fish