Venice, Italy — In Italy, when crowds get excited they sing in unison. I’m in Venice, the New Orleans of Europe, but here the flooding is planned. It’s night during the World Cup and several shops have turned televisions out to the squares, where folding chairs have been set up and local bars make rounds to the singing, cheering, klaxon-blasting soccer fans. I wander the streets, taking it in.

It is hard to describe Venice’s special charm. The city and its surrounding islands are built on sandbars and pilings driven into the Adriatic, their scores of crisscrossing canals serviced by a crazy array of water taxis, gondolas and vaporetti — the public bus boats. Its car-less stone streets weave haphazardly around and through buildings that typically date back to the early 1000s, when Marco Polo returned to the city after 24 years of adventures in the Orient. They are filled with art, museums, fresh fish and vegetable markets, trattoria, ancient churches, and parties — soccer and otherwise.

It is no wonder Venice has always attracted the world’s great creative thinkers.

From rack and pinion to jpg

I’m here to meet with Alex Gerber, a Berlin communication scientist who came down to connect while I’m in Italy.

Alex is head of communications for Fraunhofer, the German research giant who brought you the jpg, mp3s and h.264 video, among many other innovations. He is also managing partner at Innocomm, a company that specializes in taking discoveries in scientific papers and doing applied research to find ways to bring them to market. In German it’s called Kommercializacion, but it’s about much more than making a buck. It’s about what could be called knowledge engineering, filling a key gap between research and engineering.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s time, this sort of application was the goal of science experiments. Since I wear hats of both art and science myself, today I checked out a Venetian exhibition of the Tuscan’s engineering drawings made real, showing his early prototypes for rack and pinion, the bicycle, the gearshift, the submarine, the hang glider, and the differential gear, among many others.

Revolutionizing online debate
One of Alex’s team’s projects that attracted my attention is called Debate 2.0. It is inspired by Science Debate 2008, a science policy debate I organized between Barack Obama and John McCain. Alex’s team wondered if they could apply some of the concepts we used to a new online form of debate and discussion.

The result is Debate 2.0. It hopes to revolutionize online discussion and knowledge modeling, for example, in this publication.

Let’s say this story was especially controversial, and there were thousands of comments. That’s a great discussion, but the article would be a victim of its own success, since very few people are going to read past the first couple dozen comments, which often are posted by people most opposed to whatever the article may be proposing, and those who argue with them.

So all the rest are lost in a sort of knowledge eddy created by applying a linear format — time-stamped comment postings — to a nonlinear situation — crowd responses to an article.

In the online world of interactivity, a newspaper is like a reporter standing on a soapbox in a crowded Venetian market square and shouting out. What if we could apply a more nonlinear approach, like we did in Science Debate when we invited signers to submit questions to the candidates for president, and incorporated all their ideas into the discussion?

Alex’s team’s innovation is a system that organizes comments not linearly but graphically. In the future, you may see comments in newspapers organized from a bird’s eye view first into pros and cons, and then substreams of arguments that you can zoom into and navigate through with the click of a mouse instead of scrolling linearly. The process delivers much more meaning much more quickly because it delivers knowledge in context — Debate 2.0.

Holding back effects of climate change
Alex and I rent a boat and motor through the back canals away from the tourists, then head out into the bay. Venice is surrounded by dozens of islands, and we first go to see the new island the Italians are building to battle the effects of climate change. It’s one of dozens of massive geoengineering projects worldwide.

The new island is off the end of The Lido, a long sandbar of classic Mediterranean hotels with those famous beaches lined with striped sun tents…and of course the Venice film festival. The island is important because the water in Venice has to be stable within several inches or the city will flood, a specter that with climate change and rising sea levels has Italians very concerned.

If they close off most of the channel between the Lido and Cavallino-Treporti, the next barrier island, they hope they can hold back storm surges like the one that swamped New Orleans, but the good money is on enjoying Venice while you can.

Alex asks me why so many people in the United States seem to be ignoring the science of climate change. I tell him in part it’s because our journalistic model use the conflict frame to create a story: you always have to have two sides, even if 97 percent of the evidence supports one side.

Contextualizing the climate debate
For those who want climate change in a nutshell, here’s a primer: satellites have been measuring the solar energy reaching the earth since 1979. It has not increased. But measured global average temperatures have — substantially. In fact 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.

Plus, we can measure the type of carbon in the atmosphere that is produced by burning fossil fuels, because it is chemically different from regular carbon dioxide, and it is way up — even though half of it is being absorbed by the oceans, whose acidity is way up too, threatening coral reefs and shellfish. The conservative National Academies even issued a report at the behest of President Bush asserting that it is real and human-caused.

Alex thinks Debate 2.0 can help contextualize this kind of political discussion by graphically representing this mainstream scientific conclusion versus the dwindling minority. The Debate 2.0 team is working with Nature to cross-hyperlink the authors of submitted papers, and graphically represent with navigable arrows which scientists have ties to whom. The thicker the arrow, the more people are citing that particular work. You can then see in an instant what areas of science are being widely cited and which are side eddies. You can then zoom in and see the specific arguments for yourself, and see if they have merit.

Knowledge alone is weak. Knowledge in context — that has real power.

Right up Leo’s alley
We motor on from the artificial island to have lunch on the small, colorful fishing island of Burano, then make a stop at another, San Francesco del Deserto, where Saint Francis landed when he first returned from his travels. The Monastery is the only thing on the island. It dates back to the 1200s. One of the nine friars in residence gives us a tour.

Alex’s team working on applying the approach to other linear formats, like video, that can benefit from a nonlinear approach — and of course, to the online political debates of the future. It has great promise to change our web experience the same way the mp3, jpg and h.264 codec has, and perhaps will, become a useful new tool in modeling knowledge and deliberating in a new world

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and CEO of sciencedebate.org. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie “House of Sand and Fog” and won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s award for best science screenplay for “Hubble.” He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film “Dreams of a Dying Heart.” He lives in Minnesota, USA.