We’ve gotten off to a relatively good start, with a decent crowd of about seventy people who came to the first session this morning.  I was impressed since I was the one making that presentation, and I know I wouldn’t have gotten up early to hear me speak.  I kicked things off with a brief desription of the OSI Youth Initiative, and a recap of the year’s past events set to a theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Now, I’m sitting in on a presentation on the Debatepedia, which is IDEA’s “Wikipedia of debate.”  Debatepedia is a very popular tool withing the debate community, but right now it’s really not attracted many contributors.  Debatepedia is proving to be a perfect instance of the free rider problem.  The debate community is very competitive, and since everyone has access to Debatepedia,  debaters are reluctant to share their arguments on it, for fear that their arguments will be used against them in debates.  The tiny fraction of Wikipedia users who contribute to it amount to tens of thousands of people.  Contributing to Debatepedia is far more more difficult than contributing to Wikipedia, both because the interface is harder and also because it’s much harder to add a good argument than an isolated fact.  I remain pretty skeptical that Debatepedia can survive on a Wikipedia model.  If it weren’t for tireless efforts of Brooks, the would be no Debatepedia.  If Brooks were to lose interest, I doubt Debatepedia would last very long.  Already, I’m afraid it’s too large for Brooks to handle on his own.  Every time Brooks adds a new to debate to the Debabatepedia is creates more work for himself: the more public debates that are archived online the more debates need to be updated.  Already I see that a large number of debate entries are missing up to date information of have become dated.   In fact, one thing that Brooks probably needs to do is to make it easier for users to see how long it’s been since a debate has been updated.  Users should know how recently and how often a debate has been updated and checked for accuracy.  As a repository for a relatively small number of debates, I think  Debatepedia has a lot of potential.   Rather that trying to document all the public debates taking place in a language, I am interested in seeing localized versions of Debatepedia that could inspire public debate rather than serve as an archive of a public debate.  The wiki format is easier than Debatabase.

My next session was on online debate platforms.   I remain convinced that there’s a need for a good platform for people to come and debate on a variety of topic, but the market is getting awfully fragmented at this point.  The sessoin that Marjan led focused on some of the major players in this field, and found them all lacking.  I have to admit to being impressed with with www.debate.org, primarily because of its social networking and judging features.  It doesn’t support real time online debates, but right now I think it’s the best text based debate site out there and that adding video and chat facilities to it wouldn’t be that difficult.   Marshal metaphors aside, convinceme.net, is also a relatively good platfrom, but the quality of debate on the site is pretty poor at the moment and they don’t seem to have been able to sustain a large community.  OpposingViews has some  high quality debates, but only experts get to debate and the general public role is limited to voting and commenting on debates.   Helium has launched an onlne debate platform that focuses on crowdsourcing of judging.  It’s at a very early stage of development, I think it will be difficult to control small interested minorities from rigging votes.

Things have been a little chaotic this morning, but the energy is very good.  We’re going to try to get things back on schedule after lunch.