Hi Edgeryders,
It’s great to virtually know you!
As this is my first message and my presentation, let’s say that I am a researcher with a very transdisciplinary and heterogeneous background and my research focuses on innovative participatory practices for just sustainability. Currently I am Marie-Curie Fellow at Ghent University with a project titled “Crowdsouring Urban Sustainability Governance”. This investigates the (digital) social participation initiatives for urban sustainability transition and the governance models characterised by distributed (technological) agency from a critical perspective. You can read more about it here: http://crowdusg.net/
I am now preparing the (quite compulsory) policy suggestions and implementation&sustainability plan for the City of Ghent – that served as case study for my research.
However I am really bored with the classic format, I was thinking to use some (at least graphically) alternative format – such as visual story, maybe you have some interesting suggestions about it?
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Chiara! Welcome. 
Others in Edgeryders are better at creative storytelling, I am a boring guy. But, if you have a story where connections are important, I find that network visualizations work very well, and humans “get them” instinctively in a way that does not happen normally in mathematics. A lot of processing of networks in the brain happens in the visual cortex, which has amazing computational power: it is the human equivalent of your laptop running videogames in the graphics board to enhance performance.
In a previous project, the mighty @melancon made a time-lapse of the project’s conversation, represented as a semantic social network. It was a hackathon session, half a day’s work and captured by screengrab, but you see the potential. Especially if woven into a mixed format with words, pictures etc.
This is a great idea! The time-lapse of conversations might be a bit “crowded” for busy policy-makers to grasp their attention, but the idea of semantic network representaion can really be the one. I only have some experiences with Gephi, but a semantic network combined with picures, quotes and links can really work (though I have no idea of how to do it, technically I mean). So thanks indeed!
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Maybe @hugi has a better idea?
