- For any assertion, it displays supports and counterarguments to that assertion. The intuitive display prevents people from talking past each other and cuts through any spin.

- It has sophisticated credibility systems that prevent vandalism and move the top ranked arguments of each side to the top.

- It allows challenges to be issued to any other members or groups on the site, or to any outside bloggers. We also ourselves are in the process of inviting presidential campaigns to join in on various issues.

- Other features you can see for yourself on the site.

I hope you all take a moment to check it out and sign up, and please do give us any feedback you may have through the Contact link on the site. We really want to be of service and to help elevate the discourse (or at least expose people who are unwilling or unable to back up their views). Thanks!

And suppose this works– in probably wouldn’t escalate immediately to Presidential campaigns, but it could to smaller contests.

I do think, though, that it’s important not to confuse a tool for archiving debates, like Debatepedia, and a platform for debate itself.

Suppose that 10% of the voting population will at least partly vote on the candidate based on the issues and not on, say, his hair. Well, they’re listening to NPR, or reading the New Yorker or some similar dense material. It’s been very tough to out-smart the “high” media. So the winning strategy online has been to out-shout.

Compare the Internet coverage of the Presidential election between 2000 and 2004. In the former election, there was a lot of foundation money poured into various nonpartisan deliberative democracy efforts. We know what happened next– to quote Jay Rosen (in all seriousness), “George Bush singlehandedly probably did more to rejuvenate democracy.” And what a difference four years makes: 2004 brought out a new breed of netizens as partisan snipers. I’m not saying that’s bad; I’m not being cynical. That’s what worked. I can’t see deliberative democracy being restored to political campaigns anytime soon. I can see it added to governance somewhat.

Back to my original (dropped!) point. I don’t think the American public is looking for the candidates to explain in gory detail their health plans, or give away their diplomatic strategy in debates. What they (we) are looking for is grace under pressure. For better or worse, the entrenched press is in the best position to try and get candidates to sweat. Keep the basic format, but build in an audience-participation system where enough viewers can agree to give an electric shock to a BS’ing candidate.

That said, I do look forward to a “debatosphere” of ordinary folks debating online in realtime. That could be entertaining and informative. As Seth and I have noted, the architecture of the blogosphere today doesn’t encourage many fair debates.

We’re hoping, though, that the Economist will give us permission to archive their debates on the Debatabase and add links to research on the issues the debaters and general public make during the debates.

IDEA is hoping to launch a companion site in the coming months to the Debatepedia in the coming months that will use some more robust Web 2.0 tools than the MediaWiki to allow for debates like the ones you describe above. We’re going to try to improve on the work that Convinceme.net and some others are doing, in part by providing a platform for public online debate that will link debaters to the argument prompts and evidence that’s provided in places like Debatapedia. Our goal would be to have online debaters create content that would then be archived in Debatapedia.

Another interesting tool for archiving debates, by the way, is Debatemapper.com. We are working with the founders of that site to hopefully create an open source equivalent and also a desktop version of that software so people can create maps of debates on their own. The argument maps that software like this provide can be very useful tools.

http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Category:2008_US_presidential_elections