Fostering Collaboration with a Semantic Index over Textual Contributions

Collaboration is at the heart of many activities required for effective homeland security, from intelligence analysis to policy formation. We are exploring new approaches to facilitating effective collaboration that remove or reduce common barriers and that exploit opportunities to encourage more effective collaboration, including transcending the cognitive biases of the participants. In order to evaluate our approaches we are developing Angler, a web-services tool that supports collaboration among participants on some focus topic. Several challenges arise in helping participants manage their contributions. A semantic index over the participant contributions is used to address these challenges. Angler as a Collaboration Tool Collaboration is at the heart of many activities required for effective homeland security, from intelligence analysis to policy formation. We are exploring new approaches to facilitating effective collaboration that remove or reduce its common barriers and that exploit opportunities to encourage more effective collaboration, including transcending the cognitive biases of the collaboration participants and expanding their joint cognitive vision. To such effect we are building Angler, a web-services tool for supporting collaboration on some focus topic (Rodriguez et al. 2005). Angler facilitates effective collaboration by overcoming some of the common barriers to collaboration. It does so allowing for participants to be geographically distributed and allowing for asynchronous collaboration. This differentiates the Angler process from similar business processes that normally take place in a synchronous, face-to-face manner. Angler facilitates cognitive expansion during collaboration by using divergent (such as brainstorming) and convergent (such as clustering or ranking) thinking techniques. Angler is organized around the idea of virtual (possibly hierarchical) workshops. Workshops are organized by a facilitator that brings a group of people together to accomplish a knowledge task. Simple workshops usually start in a brainstorming phase and then go through other phases, such as clustering and ranking. The facilitator for the workshop will enforce and manage the timelines. As more and more workshops are stored in the Knowledge Base, a Corporate Memory is formed. In the brainstorming phase, collaboration participants are asked to contribute thoughts (or ideas) to answer a focused request from a facilitator. Participants submit contributions as brief statements on some aspect of the overall focus topic being considered; each such contributed thought is authored as a small textual document that can be reviewed by other participants. Other participants’ thoughts will be incrementally disclosed to a participant, so that he or she can think independently and can benefit from others’ ideas. Angler provides a convenient interface for participants to author such thoughts, review and respond to the thoughts of other participants, and organize the growing set of shared contributions in meaningful ways After sufficient input and review, the facilitator moves the workshop into the clustering phase. The participants begin to organize the thoughts into various clusters. Each cluster suggests one or more candidate ways to coalesce individual thoughts into a coherent theme, and the participants benefit by considering the emerging themes, for example, for scenario planning (Schwartz 1991). This process promotes a rich interchange of ideas and perspectives while removing some of the classic barriers to conventional collaboration, such as the requirement that all participants must be in the same place at the same time. It also allows each participant to express his or her own abstractions and themes (as opposed to group clustering in the same room). Angler then calculates a consensus clustering based on agglomerative clustering (King 1967) techniques and calculates how aligned is the group vision. Finally, there is a consensus and ranking phase, where participants come to understand their differing views and vote on the final names of consensus clusters. Angler has been used within several workshops (e.g., for scenario planning) and has been shown to facilitate collaboration among participants of those workshops. Table 1 presents (slightly obfuscated versions of) some thoughts contributed during a workshop considering the consequences of a hypothetical political regime change in a country (Country-X) that has nuclear weapons. These are the 23 thoughts related to nuclear security issues. A total of 140 thought contributions were made by the seven participants during this phase of the workshop. Each thought includes a pithy summarizing “Catch Phrase” as well as a concise description of the issue to be considered. ID Catch Phrase Author Description 1 Amount of fissile material G How much fissile material is in Country-X? In what form is it stored? 2 C2 apparatus D The nature of the nuclear command and control structure. 3 configuration B configuration of arsenal assembled, disassembled, state of deployment 4 control over nukes C Does the new regime have effective control over Country-X's nuclear arsenal and facilities? 5 domestic audience B domestic public opinion 6 International Support E Level of US and international support for maintaining Country-X’s nuclear security 7 new regime nuke policy C Will the new regime alter Country-X's existing nuclear policies concerning deterrence, etc.? 8 Nuclear Command and Control G Specific structures and systems; safeguards, command authority, designation 9 nuclear labs and military B domestic nuclear and military corporate interests 10 Personnel Reliability F Extent of radical Religion-Z leanings of nuclear C2 personnel, and/or level of corruption. 11 Physical security of nuclear arsenal G Permissive Action Links, Hardened sites etc. 12 quality and reliability of personnel B nature of Religion-Z among nucledar personnel 13 Regional Developments A Country-X, Country-Y and stability 14 Resource allocation D The inclination of the new leadership to allocate resources to nuclear safety and security measures (or alternatively, force expansion/enhancement). 15 Successor regime A Nature of the successor regime and its willingness to maintain strong positive control 16 Technical Reliability F Functionality of nuclear safeguard devices. 17 Threat level E Who wants Country-X's nukes, either to use or to sabotage? 18 Threat perceptions D The nature of the new leadership's threat perceptions and how it impacts nuclear decision making. 19 US contingency plans C Does the US have effective contingency plans to seize control of Country-X's nuclear arsenal to prevent it from falling into hostile hands? 20 US inputs B US inputs into safety and security of Country-X’s arsenal 21 US intervention A US willingness to preempt should instability occur 22 Vulnerability to preemption F Extent of device core separation from firing technology given events surrounding succession. 23 Willingness to divert funds E State of Country-X's economy and willingness of govt to divert funds/budgetary allocation towards nuclear security Table 1: Example Angler “thought” Contributions Technical Challenges in Supporting Collaboration One challenge that arises in collaborative contexts such as Angler involves helping participants manage the often large number of thoughts that are contributed. A rich exchange of ideas among even a relatively small group of collaborators can quickly produce a volume of thoughts that may overwhelm some participants and impair their continuing participation, obscuring “the forest for the trees.” An important observation about such sets of thought contributions is that they are not independent from each other, and semantic relations can be defined among them and used to organize them. Sometimes a thought contributed by one participant may be redundant with a thought contributed by another participant (e.g., from Table 1, thought 8 subsumes thought 2). Sometimes two thoughts share a significant amount of semantic content, and although one is not subsumed by the other the two are good candidates for merging (e.g., from Table 1 thoughts 2, 4, and 8 or thoughts 19 and 21). Establishing such semantic relations among thought contributions within a collaboration thread helps to organize the shared thoughts and helps the participants in reviewing the contributions of others and grasping how some thought contributions may converge with or diverge from other thought contributions. A second challenge that arises in collaborative contexts such as Angler involves helping participants appreciate how extensive is the coverage of their collective contributions. Sometimes two or more thoughts may be complementary in nature, so that together they cover a natural set of possible considerations. For example, some thoughts may focus on international considerations (e.g., thoughts 6 and 13 from Table 1) while other thoughts focus on domestic considerations (e.g., thoughts 5 and 9 from Table 1). Sometimes a set of thoughts will partially cover a natural set of considerations. Sometimes a set of thoughts will fail to cover any of the considerations within some natural set (e.g., no thought in Table 1 considers treaties). Establishing such properties of the coverage of a set of contributions can reveal to the participants areas that are relatively under-considered and remain candidates for additional attention and may help collaborators overcome their personal and collective cognitive biases. Through spurring considerations of otherwise unexamined horizons during collaborative brainstorming, Angler may address one of the primary deficiencies cited by the 9/11 Commission; that is, “a failure of imagination” (9/11 Commission 2004). A third challenge that arises in collaborative contexts such as Angler involves helping participants to perceive shared interests or complementing expertise with other participants. The c