If you’ve looked over the FAQ, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been stalling on answering a few of the questions. Now that I’m over the launch crunch, I hope to answer some of these questions and respond to a few new ones. Up first: “What is the long-term plan for this project? When will it be available for new topics?”
Here’s my tenative schedule of how I expect this project to evolve over the next six months. I say tenative because I expect that as I learn more about what works and what doesn’t, I’ll probably update this schedule to include features that are more interesting or useful.
- Edit-Handling/Administration (by August 2006): There are still some bugs in the editing process that I will be sorting out as edits trickle in. I’ll be working on the administration backend for a while in preparation for lifting the approval process on all edits. One idea is to allow for a ‘cooling off’ or lockdown period on any arguments that become too contentious (based on Wikipedia) but it will take time to implement.
- Develop Citation / Evidence Interface (Sept 2006): Of all the non-editable objects, ‘citations’ and ‘evidence quotes’ are the most critical for a functional system that can be forked for new topics. The existing interface is a little cumbersome and I want to build better tools that will allow users to populate the arguments with quotes from news articles or other sources.
- Develop Positions Interface: (Sept-Oct 2006): After developing the citation interface, the next step is to allow users to develop better positions and position statements to represent the full spectrum of opinion in the debate.
- Develop Consensus Tools (Oct-Nov 2006): Several people have suggested adding in a mechanism for helping users resolve the conflict between an argument and its counterargument. I’m working on a few ideas for how this could work and will post updates on the project blog.
- Cleanup and Document Software (Nov-Dec 2006): It should take a couple of months to fork and document the software to a new version without the space weapons focus.
- Launch of Open Debate Engine Project (Jan 2007): Finally, the plan is to fully launch the open debate engine project in January 2007. I’m still uncertain as to what form this will take but will post updates on the blog.
User submitted edits are starting to trickle in which means I’m discovering a whole new set of bugs to fix and improvements to make. I’ll continue to work on the backend to make this process easier but any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I can already tell that I will be lifting the ‘approval‘ requirement sooner than I intially expected. In the meantime, here are a few new update widgets for tracking edits and comments:
I’ll setup RSS feeds for these new widgets shortly.