About

Description
Videos
Acknowledgements
Source Code
Publications

Description

The Collective Intelligence Dashboard (CI Dashboard) was an open online service that provided analytics visualisations for online debate platforms. It made conversational and social dynamics visible and fed them back to communities to support awareness and reflection. The site offered an overview of visualisations, demos with sample or user data, options to build custom dashboards, and information on embedding these visualisations into other platforms.

The dashboard was developed through research on Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) by the IDea group at the Knowledge Media Institute. CCI emerged from structured online discourse and argumentation, aiming to support collective sensemaking of complex societal issues. A key challenge the research addressed was the dominance of text-based debate, which lacked effective visualisation methods. The CI Dashboard responded by offering engaging, interactive visualisations to make debates more tangible, understandable, and shareable.

Early user analysis highlighted issues such as difficulties in gaining an overview of debates, limited awareness of others’ contributions, duplication of ideas, challenges for newcomers in knowing where to begin, and a lack of tools for community managers to analyse, guide, and summarise debates. These findings shaped the dashboard’s design, which provided visualisations, analytics, and alerts to improve participation, contribution quality, and debate management.

CIDashboard acted as a visualisation service for platforms such as Assembl, DebateHub, and LiteMap. Communication between platforms and the dashboard was based on the Catalyst Interchange Format (CIF), modelled in RDF and serialised as JSON-LD. Visualisations were generated directly from CIF data or via the Catalyst Metric Service, which calculated specific metrics to feed into the dashboard.

CIDashboard is part of a family of digital technologies developed by the IDea research group (Intelligent Deliberation research group in KMi) and designed to improve collective intelligence and online deliberation is small-to-large collaborating groups. If you are interested to know more about our research, CIDashboard and similar tech we are developing please contact the IDea team.

Videos

A Short Introduction to CIDashboard

Large Visualisations

Mini Visualisations

Alerts

Acknowledgements

CIDashboard’s design, development and testing was undertaken as part of the FP7 Project Catalyst on Collective Applied Intelligence and Analytics for Social Innovation by the Knowledge Media Institute team at the Open University.

Team

Professor Anna De Liddo
Professor Simon Buckingham-Shum
Michelle Bachler – Software Development
Samantha Colclough – Software Development
Harriett Cornish – Graphics

Source Code

For the source code for the CiDashbaord website application, please visit our Git Hub: https://github.com/idea-
kmi/CIDashboard
Note: the software is released under LGPL license.