Re:What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans
by TeMPOraL on Thursday March 02, 2017 @11:43AM
(#13775501)
So I understand the following document is a kind of use case description of the solution your company provides?
http://www.la.one.un.org/images/publications/Analysis_UN_sur...
It looks very interesting indeed. Is it potentially suitable for NGOs, and if so, are there any plans of making some of it available for such nonprofits? I ask partly because I'd love to get my hands on this (and do run an NGO I could use as an excuse ;)).
Re:What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans
by nkoren on Thursday March 02, 2017 @01:08PM
(#13776531)
Yep, that's exactly what it does, and indeed, we've worked with quite a few NGOs and nonprofits! If you're interested, send a note on the website's contact form. Mention that you found out about it from Nathan on Hacker News, and I'll make sure you get priority treatment. :-)
Futurescaper is a tool for collaboratively creating and analysing crowd-sourced systems maps. The purpose of doing this is to better understand the dynamics of a complex problem domain, where many different perspectives are required to get a complete picture. It's not really about annotating documents; more about getting people to tell stories in ways that can be converted into causal graphs, which then can be combined with each other to produce a detailed map of the possibility space, which can then be inform strategic planning. If that makes any sense!
Our biggest customer is the United Nations, which uses it for projects like this one: http://www.la.one.un.org/media-center/publications/252-un-su...
The advantage of doing in this way is that it explicitly encourages the people who interact with it to take more of a systems approach to their thinking, helping to surface hidden root causes and predict unintended consequences or emergent knock-on effects.
It's a bit of an odd company, but happened kind of accidentally: just a weekend coding project (to assist a friend's dissertation on crowdsourced scenario planning) which spun badly out of control.