OpenCongress.org Bill Tracking Tools and Widgets

OpenCongress.org is a website developed by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation to help people connect with what is happening in Congress. As they explain, "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, and more to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress." Read about the impressive set of features in the About OpenCongress section.

I got interested in using OpenCongress.org as a way to track a newly introduced House Bill that would promote conflict resolution and mediation in educational settings. You can keep up with this bill via this link: H.R.4000 - Conflict Resolution and Mediation Act of 2009 or via a widget that tracks a given bill's progress.



Of special interest to readers of this blog is the fact that you can track specific issues, including one labeled "Alternative dispute resolution, mediation, arbitration" and create a widget on this issue to embed in a blog or website. Here's the ADR issue widget output.



OpenCongress.org has a robust open api for developers. Learn more here.

  

Back Issues of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and The Rotarian online via Google Books

The scanning elves at google books have continued to work hard to provide us with full-text goodies, including a growing collection of full color back issues of magazines.

A couple of the currently available publications may be of special interest to readers of this blog due to their special concerns for peace and conflict resolution. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (in publication since the 1940s) and The Rotarian (in publication since 1912) are available for searching and online reading.

You can browse back issues, and even embed a given issue in your website or course management system using the link link in the upper right when viewing an issue. See two examples of the embedded view below.

This one embeds a specific issue of The Rotarian that reviews their work on peace:


This example links to a specific story on the history of the Pugwash movement in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

  

Mediation Case Law Database (downloadable spreadsheet)

James Coben and Peter Thompson at Hamline University did a comprehensive review of law suits related to the practice of mediation from 1999-2005 and they present it all for our use in the Mediation Case Law Database, available for download as an excel file. The collection includes data on 2219 cases divided into the following categories:

Personal Injury/Tort
Contract/Commercial
Family Law
Employment (including harassment and discrimination claims)
Estate
Malpractice
Tax/Bankruptcy
IDEA Claims
Other

The collection nice categorizes more than 1,000 court opinions on law suits arising from mediation, e.g., suit for enforcement of an alleged mediation agreement, mediation sanctions, duty to mediate, mediation confidentiality, mediation ethics or malpractice in the conduct of the mediation, mediation/arbitration issues, fees, or other issue.

Perhaps that ADR malpractice insurance is worth keeping up-to-date after all...

  

SALTO Youth Toolbox for Training Activities

The European Union promotes intercultural understanding as a key message for youth. The SALTO-Youth (Support, Advanced Learning and Training Opportunities) project is one important manifestation of this. A network of 8 Resource Centers provide training and support materials for youth workers across Europe. To promote sharing, they host a resource website called the Toolbox for Training & Youth Work that provides details on close to a 1000 activities and resources of special interest to trainers. A search for activities related to conflict turned up 49 entries, many of which include downloadable guides or powerpoints in addition to the online description. Worth checking out!

  

Conflict War and Peace Encyclopedia Entries

The online document service Scribd provides a platform for uploading documents and viewing them in a lightweight flash viewer. They think of themselves as the YouTube of documents. Recently I did a search on conflict and discovered that an enterprising student (apparently) has posted 63 scanned entries from an Encyclopedia on Conflict, War and Peace. Like YouTube, keeping track of the copyright on uploaded documents is a challenge, so who knows how long these entries will stay available for viewing.

  

Stay updated on recent journal articles using ticTOC and jOMPL.org

As folks who have followed my coding experiments know, I've been interested for some time in tools to help busy "pracademics" stay in touch with new developments in their fields. The UK-based ticTOC project and the related jOPML tool provide a powerful way to track recently published articles in the key journals in your field.

The ticTOC project was developed using funds from JISC, a higher education technology consortium in the U.K., and it is provided free of charge. If you want to save a list of favorite journals on the site you need to create an account, but it is not required in order to use the service. The online tool provides a three-pane interface that lets you do the following core tasks.

* Find journal Table of Contents (TOCs) for more than 12,500 scholarly journals by subject, title or publisher.
* View the latest TOC for each journal.
* Link to the full text of articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).
* Export article citations to RefWorks (subscription required)
* Select and save key journals to view future TOCs.
* Export TOC news feeds to popular feedreaders to monitor on your own

The jOPML.org service developed by Scott Wilson uses the ticTOC database to provide a quick access way to search and then export a collection of journal TOCs news feeds as an OPML file for import into Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator or other popular feed readers. An OPML file is a pre-packaged list of feeds. Subscribing to all the feeds in an OPML is as simple as importing the OPML file. ticTOC provides OPML export services as well (see lower right corner of the interface) based on your saved favorites. Sometimes the ticTOC tool seems slow to respond to user clicks (for instance when expanding a TOC to view article abstracts), but overall the platform seems stable and works well.


Note: People interested in in TOC services may also want to check out the services provided by CiteULike, a bibliographic tool I have been using for years.

  

Dispute Finder - A tool from the Confrontational Computing Project at Intel

The Confrontational Computing Project is a collaboration between Intel Research and the University of California at Berkeley. The project grows from the assumption that much of the web is built around opinions, arguments and beliefs presented in blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news articles and other forums.

The project is interested in the following kinds of questions:
How do people use the web to help them form beliefs about the world? How do people promote their own opinions to others online? Can we build tools that make it easier for people to understand when and why other people hold opinions different to those that they read? Can we make it easier for people to assemble and promote arguments? Can we create a personalized web that understands what you know or believe already, and tailors the way information is presented accordingly?



The project has produced two tools, first Think Link and now its simpler-to-use but somewhat less powerful successor Dispute Finder. The Dispute Finder provides a browser-based tool (a Firefox Extension) that shows you when information you read is disputed, and helps you find and mark evidence for alternative points of view. Arguments, pro and con, may be voted on to help move certain saved snippets toward the top of the found items list.


Perhaps the easiest way to understand what it does is to watch the demonstration video.



Both tools are constructed with two general users in mind:
• Activists who care strongly about a particular issue and combine the tools with a search engine to find and mark snippets that make claims that they disagree with
• Sceptical Readers who install the tools as a browser extension to see when statements they read are disputed and find other sources that present alternative viewpoints.

It is interesting to consider the potential impact of these kind of tools on conflict processes. Will it encourage further polarization or will it enable more considered and reasoned arguments built around strong evidence instead of bluster or misdirection?

The code for the project is open source and an API is available so that the tools can be integrated with other applications in the future. More on the working details of the initiative can be found in this academic paper.

  

Topical Video Archives from Conversations with History

I've mentioned the Conversations with History video series from the University of California at Berkeley before, but I wanted to note that the curators have been busy developing topical archives, many of which now point to YouTube videos of the interviews which could be used as supplemental materials in courses. The full collection includes more than 450 interviews with a diverse group of "diplomats, statesmen, and soldiers; economists and political analysts; scientists and historians; writers and foreign correspondents; activists and artists."

Three topic areas that may be of particular interest include:
The Peace Movement and the Nuclear Arms Race
and
Peacekeeping, Humanitarian Intervention, and Nation Building
and
The Search for Peace in the Middle East

  

Intercultural and Interdenominational MEETING POINTS: A proposition and 80 prayers and texts for peace

Baketik, a peace centre established in 2006 in the Basque Country, is working on the "ethical management of conflicts". One of the interesting products of their work is a guidebook entitled Intercultural and Interdenominational MEETING POINTS: A proposition and 80 prayers and texts for peace that provides examples from across the spectrum of world religions that support nonviolence and conflict resolution.

Included are religious prayers for peace from the following faith groups:
Buddhism
Hinduism
Islam
Jainism
Sintoism
Sikhism
Traditional African Religions
American Indian Religions
Zoroastrianism
Judaism
Bah’ai
Christianity

Also provided are a variety of short texts promoting peace that have been organized in the following categories:
Peace as a demand and a desire.
Reasons for Peace
The Absurdity of Violence
Peace as a Process...which begins from the inside
Peace and Action
Peace and Ethics
Peace and Justice
Peace and Love

  

Global Peace Builders' Catalogue of Approaches to Peacebuilding

The Global Peace Builders project has put together a nice illustrated snapshot of various approaches to peacebuilding, selecting 18 examples from different parts of the world. The focus is on projects working to create the conditions for sustainable peace in their communities. As they explain,
"The catalogue is not an all-encompassing listing of the 'key' international peacebuilding approaches or an exhaustive evaluation of the 'best' of peacebuilding practice from across the world. It is a brief glimpse of the peacebuilding activity currently taking place, and offers an insight into just some of the many important approaches to peacebuilding currently being implemented locally and worldwide, at a grassroots, community, national or international level."

Get the English language version of the catalog here. It is available in Spanish, French and Portuguese as well.