I am setting up a Discourse installation which will be used for debates. Mostly this will involve pro/con discussions about issues in medicine and other academic disciplines with contrasting discussion about links to documents/articles.
It may well be that Discourse is fine for this right out of the box if I simply set up the categories and tags and sample topics accordingly. Can anyone suggest any particular theme or theme component or plugin that would be particularly applicable to this type of discussion?
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If you search for posts I made with the word “economist” in them you’ll find some interesting links related to this.
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That is fascinating reading - thanks Jeff. The focus on ways to separate “expert” discussion vs “public” discussion is in some part an interesting mirror of the story of Wikipedia’s founding. Arguably to the creators’ surprise, the public Wikipedia far overtook its predecessor Nupedia which was restricted to “experts.” It still remains a mystery to me how/why trolls are not more of an issue on Wikipedia.
In any event, the format used by The Economist in its debates clearly requires intense moderator participation and thus seems feasible at best for very small volume (though extremely high quality) content.
I was initially wondering mostly if anyone has written a user interface structuring the content a bit more, regardless of the credentials of the author - perhaps integrating something like Arguman into the Discourse interface. It seems as if that has not been done, but the basically threaded discussion format may be fine for most issues.
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