Counterpointy.org Intro

Counterpointy.org is a little bit like Github and Stackoverflow for policy debate. Slides for BarCamp Canberra 2012.

Transcript

1. Counterpointy.org Ben Williamson
2. How do societies take collective action?
3. • Citizen input via elected representatives • Issues are lost in leadership battles • Unable to respond to the big challenges • There has to be a better way Representative democracy doesn't scale
4. • Blogs, forums, Twitter • GetUp petitions • Is it working? We're trying to engage the issues
5. • (Debatepedia & Argumatrix use MediaWiki) • One current version of each article • Works when we can agree what is relevant • Difficult to satisfy all viewpoints on a contentious issue Wikis don't work well for debate
6. There has to be a better way
7. • Map the points in a debate • We can make it distributed, collaborative, social! Argument mapping
8. • Each point has a page • Lists of supporting and opposing points • You can agree or disagree • Vote arguments up or down Counterpointy.org
9. Story so far • Started coding at OSDC in Nov 2011 • Designed for mobile first • Most “debate” content is just me so far
10. Design features • Designed to distribute - a point’s identity is the SHA hash of its text • You can’t edit my beliefs - “edit” creates a new point, suggested as an alternate wording
11. • You control your own fork • Can merge changes from others • No central point of truth Like Github
12. • The crowd votes up relevant points • The crowd votes down irrelevant points • (But no “reputation score” is planned) Like Stackoverflow
13. • Start with community groups • Policy debate within political parties • Articulate all policy reasoning as argument maps Should scale down too
14. • Lots of basic stuff I skipped in the rush • Emails with new points that challenge your views • Realtime updates as points are added • Lists of users to filter views, vote counts • Private deliberation spaces, for $ What next
15. • Use it! (Pseudonyms welcome) • Needs genuine debate with more voices • Your point is valid and welcome even if you are not an expert. Change it later. • Try it for deliberation within your community group - tell me what you need! How you can help
16. • github.com/benw/counterpointy • Node.js, Express, Socket.IO, MySQL • Willing to help Node.js newcomers! Get the code
17. Ben Williamson benw@pobox.com @benwilliamson Me