The Climate Collaboratorium: Project Overview

SUMMARY The goal of the Climate Collaboratorium project is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to address one of the most important problems confronting humanity today: global climate change. Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the project will develop a global, on-line forum in which people can create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed plans for what we humans can do about global climate change. At the core of the system will be an evolving collection of user-created plans based on computational models of the actions humans can take and the predicted impacts of those actions. For instance, the actions in a plan might include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by various amounts or implementing policies such as a carbon tax. The impacts might include concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperature changes, and economic costs. Users can also debate plans by entering arguments for or against the various plans or by entering other comments about the plans' plausibility and desirability. And users can rate the credibility of various arguments and vote on the plans and positions they find most feasible, credible, and desirable. Just as important as developing the software capabilities, the project will also develop the community and organizational processes to use this software, and empirically evaluate the actual use of the system. This paper provides an overview of the project's plans and current status. Anticipated contributions At a minimum, this work will provide lessons about how to design large-scale collective decision-making tools that integrate computer modeling, on-line debates, and group voting and rating. We believe such tools will be useful for a wide range of societal and managerial problems. More specifically, this on-line forum will also help educate the general public about the real issues involved in global climate change. And most importantly, by constructively engaging a broad range of scientists, policy makers, business people, and ordinary citizens, this forum may help develop plans and policies that are actually better than any that would have otherwise been developed. If the project is successful in its grandest ambitions, it will lead to the creation in a few years of a societal institution that is comparable to (though perhaps somewhat smaller than) Wikipedia. It will be an on-line community used routinely by scientists, politicians, journalists, and anyone with a professional interest in climate change. It will also be a standard resource for educators, …