Improving Debate, Filtering Trolls, and The Long Now Foundation

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@canadaduane

I welcome your input in either guiding me to other discussion threads where this has already been discussed, or in connecting these ideas with specific features in Discourse, since I am only superficially involved as a user of the forum

Here are some tangentially related discussions, as they too delve into edge use cases for Discourse as an advanced debate engine:

Two-layered conversations (shadow topic)

Consider a community of “experts” on some topic. Experts would like to post articles or questions on this board, to be discussed only by the other members, who are also experts. For this part, they can use any reasonable traditional message board software (with membership restricted to experts). Here is the new part. For each topic opened by an expert for comments by other experts, there should be a “shadow” topic automatically opened for comments by “the public”. Say, the expert’s topic is vi…

Discourse as the ideal format for an open governance / government 2.0 forum?

Discourse as the ideal format for an open governance / government 2.0 forum? Intro: I feel that Discourse is poised to become great: It’s a well-made, collaborative, discussion friendly venue that could work as a platform to get people involved with their communities. TL;DR: Discourse can easily become a means to have people discuss and critique on what needs to be done in their local community. Background: In December 2012 me and a few friends began the process of starting a hackerspace.…

Constructive Discussion and Dialectic

Hey all, Something’s that fascinated me is the formatting of debate, and particularly political debate. That how we talk to each other is as important as what we talk about. I am interested in how Discourse can be used and modified to cultivate certain discursive values. One of the projects I’ve taken on and applied to grad school in political science was looking at how much more effectively can debate be if people come together to talk about problems and follow certain rules. We do this to an…