Debate

All content described here is currently a work in progress but is protected by the terms of use statement.

The debate section is a core feature of the site. It empowers users to view what issues are getting the most attention and to express their own views in a respectful debate setting. This section of the site provides an opportunity for the public to create debates, vote to affect the popularity of debates, comment on debates and vote to support the most popular arguments in the debate, and to generally become more involved and aware of political issues. It will have its own “Debate Central” page which acts as a hub for managing one’s own debates and getting a snapshot of current debate activity among peers and the public. Debate creation tools allow for deep customization and attention to detail making arguments extremely thorough. Creation tools make it easy to have advanced scholarly debates, or to simply write a short topic description and start a debate within seconds using simple presets.

There are numerous debate sites on the web, but Digital Citizen will do a better job of catering specifically to political debates through the unique nature of debate creation options, the ongoing opportunities to interact in a debate, and the convenience of connecting debates to other features and content of the site. A debate can be set to public or private, and can even invite specific users or a group list of recipients (a great opportunity for social science teachers/professors to hold a debate by inviting a group email list of their students). The creator can set the duration terms of the debate, what statics are shown from results of activity, and the voting parameters to help unveil prevailing arguments. If debates are created to be shared with the public, they can be “voted up” to gain popularity among other debates making it a more likely topic to “go viral” and get a lot of attention. In addition, within a debate, users can vote on the arguments they like most and affect the order in which those arguments appear as they are sorted from top to bottom by vote count, and then date/time for all arguments with no vote. The debate creators can add video, pictures, legislative text, politician profile info, and external links to their debates making them more compelling and providing context or support for their arguments. Debates, and debate comments, can appear in social networking streams, be convertible into calendar events, and linked to arguments for legislative text revision in Open-Source Legislation. These are some of the advantages to having a debate resource alongside a collection of tools for political interaction.

Honor badge earnings from this section of the site will be a robust opportunity for user rewards. Political debate is needed for facts to be revealed, and for prevailing arguments to reach the eyes and ears of decision makers. Thus rewards for this important work should be plentiful. The reward system will be an ongoing work-in-progress but badges for creating debates, having debates that reach benchmarks of visits or comments, and commenting in debates, are good activities to reward. Some badge types may have scaling ranks while others are simply one-time achievements.

Brainstorm wire frame of a central area for debate functions of the site: