Core Ideas

Ameliorate is centered around Topics. A Topic is something that you care enough about that you’ll spend efforts to discuss, investigate, align on, and/or understand better. To make it easier to do these, Ameliorate organizes Topics in a particular way:

• information is broken down into concepts and relations between those concepts - this enables any individual piece to be precisely considered, and the whole can be quickly understood at a high level;
• the breakdown of a problem and its solutions is distinguished from known opinions and justification, from known unknowns, from information sources and suspected facts - this enables clarity regarding which kind of thing we’re talking about, and what kinds of biases to expect for the thing;
• the concepts and relations used to convey the breakdown of a problem are constrained specifically to the domain of solving problems - this enables a consistent way of representing and understanding them, and enables specialized tooling to be built for viewing and working with the information.

Let’s look at an example Topic to understand what this organization looks like - you can follow along in the app here: https://ameliorate.app/examples/detailed-cars-going-too-fast.

Concepts and Relations

If you open the example, you’ll be greeted by something like this:

Here there are a bunch of concepts, represented through boxes called “nodes”, and relations between those concepts, represented through lines called “edges”.

If we click on a node, its edges and neighboring nodes are highlighted, and we can see some details about the node in the Topic Pane:

Here, the selected node is a Problem node, with the text “cars going too fast in my neighborhood”. In this case, this Problem is the Topic’s centerpiece, and we want to address it.

We can see a few edges connecting the Problem to other nodes as well; some “causes” edges indicating nodes that cause this Problem, and some “created by” edges indicating effects that are created by this Problem.

Nodes are the core building blocks of a Topic - their brevity allows a quick high-level overview of the topic, and they enable auxiliary information (notes, opinions, justification, uncertainties, facts) to be organized specifically with the individual node(s) for which they’re relevant.

Problem Breakdown

Ameliorate defines a standard way of breaking down problems and solutions, as seen below:

These are:

1. Central Problem - used as a point to organize the other nodes around; there may be multiple Problems in a Topic that are important enough to be “Central”, but then the Diagram can get hectic and you’ll want to use Views and Filters to better understand your Topic
2. Problem Causes - these can be individually addressed as ways of preventing the Problem
3. Problem Effects - these can be positive (Benefits), negative (Detriments), or neutral (Effects); Detriments can be individually addressed as ways of mitigating the Problem
4. Solution Criteria - these should be worded as a positive thing (e.g. “inexpensive” as opposed to “costly”) and indicate why some Solutions may be better than others; you might come up with these by asking “what’s good/bad about this Solution?”; you can tie Solutions directly to pieces of Problems, but if you want to compare Solutions, you’ll want to relate Solutions to Problems through Criteria
5. Solution Effects - same as Problem Effects, except are created by Solutions
6. Solution Components - these exist to break down Solutions; you might make two Solutions that reuse most of the same components
7. Solutions - these are generally the high-level options for addressing the Problem

Since these nodes are used to defined the Topic’s breakdown, they’re sometimes referred to as “Breakdown nodes”. You should use these as you see fit; if your Topic is simple in some ways, you may not need to use all of these pieces.

Known Opinions and Justification

Your Topic will inherently be biased by your opinions, but allowing known opinions to be explicitly called out can reduce this bias. Scores accomplish this - they convey how important you think a node is, or how much an edge’s relation is believed to be true:

Scores range from 1 to 9; generally, 1-4 are negative, 5 and unscored (”-”) are neutral, and 6-9 are positive. In this case, the Detriment is scored a 9 to convey that we think the risk of pedestrians being hit is a big deal, and we should care about it.

Justification is used to support or critique the importance of a node, or the truth of an edge. You can find these in the node’s details:

In this case, the Detriment’s importance is justified by saying that it reduces the feeling of safety in the neighborhood.

Known Unknowns, Information Sources, and Suspected Facts

Oftentimes, there are things we’re aware we don’t know, things that might be valuable to find out - we can convey these in the Research section of a node’s details, through Questions:

Here, it’s possible that the importance of “pedestrians might get hit” could change based on if there are more-susceptible pedestrians in the neighborhood, so we can note this down as a Question “are there many children, handicapped, elderly, in the area?”

Findings from research can also be put in this section, as Facts and Sources. These might be something like a statistic “25% of families in area have children” from a source “neighborhood census” (with a URL).