Consensus Builder: How knowledge sharing can help break political logjams

Consensus Builder is a vision for an internet application that can organize and facilitate political discussion involving large numbers of participants. Consensus Builder will invite people to speak about what they know and care about. To fully participate, speakers will need to engage in interpretive processes that yield ontological models of statements like those used for the Semantic Web. Analyses of similarities and differences between statements will support listening and exchange of ideas. Semantically informed query and summarization capabilities will aggregate and publish speaker beliefs and facilitate learning from Consensus Builder. One potential early focus for Consensus Builder would be to support a badly needed national discussion about health care. Applications from the organizational to the global levels are also possible.