Building a timeline

WikiCurve gives you the insights

WikiCurve happens in real-time with each issue growing and developing as the community gets involved. For some issues, there will be hundreds of individual events which have influenced community attitudes.

As an issue matures and interest around it grows, it moves through six stages. The movement in public sentiment can take months, years or even centuries.

To participate in WikiCurve, you register (you can use your Facebook or Twitter account, for convenience) and then explore the timeline for an issue that interests you horizontally or with the WikiCurve view.

Where an event catches your attention, you can drill into the details and vote on how you think the event influenced the development of the issue. You can add extra information, new sources and ideas.

When you vote on an event, you can see how your opinion compares with everyone who has also voted on that event.

If there was an important event that isn’t on the timeline, you can add it yourself.

WikiCurve puts each event on the curve based on all of the votes from the WikiCurve community. You can click to see the curve, which will tell you which stage the issue is in at the moment and how fast it seems to be moving.

Background

WikiCurve was created by Futureye, a management consulting firm that specialises in social licence to operate consulting – helping our clients identify and manage community outrage, build a deep understanding of stakeholder expectations and creating strategy, policy and communications that reflect those expectations.

Curve maturation Stages

WikiCurve states that issues move through 6 stages of maturation. During each phase, critical events happens that helps to shape our attitudes and opinions. They could be as dramatic as an oil spill, an upcoming global Summit or a political event. Media interest in a visionary leader, could spark discussion of an issue or sway public opinion. Even the release of a popular movie can have an impact on opinion development.

The stages are:

  1. Discovery – a few people notice something new or have different ideas about the status quo and start talking/writing about it.
  2. Theory Development- different theories are developed by “fringe” groups of activists, academics or others. Specialists talk about the issue and become engaged in theory development, but it doesn’t have much public profile.
  3. Popular Interest – the issue starts to come into public awareness, media coverage about the issue starts to spread and bigger more mainstream groups begin to form to advocate on the issue.
  4. Public Debate – the issue is becoming important to people and they are talking about it with their friends and family. Advocacy and pushback from different groups is happening and opinions are being formed through debate. Different political parties may have policies on how to address the issue and early laws might be made.
  5. Policy and Regulation – policy is developed and contested, industry groups might put voluntary regulation into place and attitudes are becoming more fixed.
  6. Mainstream Acceptance – the issue is in the mainstream and has become a “norm” and those who hold alternate views are sanctioned for not adopting the requisite values, behaviours, and practices expected.

Your vote for each event will help place it in the appropriate phase on the curve. The further to the right you place the second and third sliders, the higher a phase you are placing the event in.

For more information about the ideas behind WikiCurve, see the Curve Theory page.

Futureye have used the Curve to help a wide range of clients understand the maturation of issues that impact their business. If you would like to talk to us about creating a WikiCurve for you, contact us on +61 3 8636 1111 or info@futureye.com.

WikiCurve Partners

WikiCurve is being used to facilitate important conversations around the world. Some of our key partnerships include:

  • Fairfax Media - Drug law reform
  • Stakeholder Forum - Sustainability issues relating to the Rio+20 Earth Summit

Fairfax Media

Futureye partnered with Fairfax Media across print and on-line editions, to have a conversation about drug law reform. The conversation was launched at Sydney University on May 21, 2012 with a panel of 6 experts and being live streamed across the Fairfax press. It concluded on June 4, 2012 with a panel of 4 experts at The Age Auditorium in Melbourne. During the time it was open, over 23,000 people visited the WikiCurve pages and we received over 500 votes as well as hundreds of very thoughtful comments.

You can view the conversation at:

PDF Instructions for using Wikicurve on Fairfax

You can watch the video of the launch event at Sydney University on May 21, 2012.

Stakeholder Forum

The Stakeholder Forum is the world's largest NGO and represents the NGO community at United Nations level. Stakeholder Forum is deeply engaged with the NGO community around the world in fostering conversations about the key themes for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio and beyond.

Futureye is partnering with Stakeholder Forum to use WikiCurve to help give the NGO and broader community a voice on the critical sustainable development issues to be presented at the Earth Summit and moving forward into the broader community.