SoCS: The Climate Collaboratorium: A Tool for Large-Scale Model-Centric Collective Decision-Making

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The goals of this project are to develop collaborative tools for helping to solve difficult managerial and societal problems and to test these tools on an important problem confronting the world today: global climate change. Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the project will develop a global, on-line forum - called the Climate Collaboratorium - in which thousands of people around the world can create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed plans for what humans can do about global climate change. At the core of the system will be an evolving collection of user-created plans based on computer simulations of the actions humans can take and the predicted impacts of those actions. Users will also be able to debate the pros and cons of different plans and vote for the plans and arguments they find most credible and desirable. Intellectual merit The primary intellectual contributions of this work will be lessons about how to design large-scale model-centric collective decision-making tools and the communities to use them. Broader impacts At a minimum, this on-line forum can help educate the general public about the real issues involved in global climate change. But more importantly, by constructively engaging a broad range of scientists, policy makers, and ordinary citizens, this forum may help develop plans and policies that are actually better than any that would have otherwise been developed. In short, it could become a combination of a kind of simulation game for climate change, a Wikipedia for controversial topics, and an electronic democracy on steroids.