Section 68 Using the causal map app for real-time, collaborative theory construction

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Imagine you are at a public meeting about, say, the consequences of policy X. The moderator says, go to this link on your phone / tablet. The participants do that, and see a screen with just our two text boxes, where they can enter details of causal links relevant to policy X. They can see the whole crowd-sourced causal map as it emerges, perhaps on a screen at the front of the room. You could get a whole interactively sourced map in a few minutes. I don’t think there is any other platform which will let you do this at the moment.

Details / things to tweak:

If the people didn’t already have a pretty clear idea of what a causal link is, you’d have to prime them with some examples.
A weakness is that you might get a lot of different names for essentially the same thing like heath / illness / family health / family wellness etc. So it would be cool if, when someone types something new, a pop-up appears where they are invited to say which existing factor this thing is most similar to. (I might build this functionality into the main app anyway.) Then the map could be optionally automatically simplified by coalescing factors which are judged to be similar.
It might be especially interesting with a room full of stakeholders who are actually part of the map, e.g. if the subject was well-being of elderly people and you had a room full of nurses, community health workers, relatives etc.
When, as usual, the participants type the names of the factors beginning and end of each causal link, they can either type what they want or select from existing possibilities which pop up as they type. These possibilities can either be based only on the participant’s own existing entries or on the growing list of everybody’s entries.
On their phones, the participants could either be allowed to see nothing, or just their own map, or the collective map.
On their phones, the participants could be allowed or not allowed various extra things from the full version of the app, like the ability to add a note or evidence to a link, or to specify the strength or direction.
This could either be done live and/or staggered over time like a web questionnaire.

Advantages / disadvantages:

nice sexy wow factor
perhaps less interesting for getting deep, quality evidence
it’s pretty simple for me to provide this simplified version of the application - I mean, it works now already but I’d need to work on hiding stuff in the interface which the participants wouldn’t want or need to see.