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If you've got any ideas on how to structure a high quality forum that's easy for people to start using, I invite you to add them here.

A wiki is a good tool for accumulating and summarizing insights revealed in a discussion forum, enabling new members of the forum to quickly get up to speed, and providing a resource for decision-makers.

Such a wiki can be hierarchically structured, providing quick summaries at the top-level, but allowing people to drill down to specific points.

But a normal wiki is no good for contentious topics, because a lack of consensus causes editing wars.

That's why I made Make The Case, a wiki where an article is a case for or against a particular proposition, but which also allows people to provide and edit paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttals, which are displayed alongside.

Unlike debate spread over separate articles, or in a forum, this gives false information and spin nowhere to hide, allowing both the case and the counter-case to be iteratively improved.

The code behind Make The Case is Open Source.

A wiki is a good tool for accumulating and summarizing insights revealed in a discussion forum, enabling new members of the forum to quickly get up to speed, and providing a resource for decision-makers.

Such a wiki can be hierarchically structured, providing quick summaries at the top-level, but allowing people to drill down to specific points.

But a normal wiki is no good for contentious topics, because a lack of consensus causes editing wars.

That's why I made Make The Case, a wiki where an article is a case for or against a particular proposition, but which also allows people to provide and edit paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttals, which are displayed alongside.

Unlike debate spread over separate articles, or in a forum, this gives false information and spin nowhere to hide, allowing both the case and the counter-case to be iteratively improved.

The code behind Make The Case is Open Source.

In fact, I have more faith in articles that allow for comments.

That's unmoderated comments. (Not moderated by publishers. User ratings are OK.)

Try leaving a less than enthusiastic comment in a lot of places, and your comment never appears or gets deleted.

This often provides a needed balance on what is being written in the article (especially since most articles seemed to be more editorials as of late. ). And the insightful posts usually provide sources for their comments

Journalism is all about the story, which must be provocative. Balanced accounts are "boring".

In addition to comments, I'd like to see rebuttals placed paragraph for paragraph alongside the original article, like my Make The Case site.

The article has a definition of statesman I like:

It's also an important function of government to be a statesman and that's one of the things I think that's lacking in modern government these days is very rarely do you ever see a politician actually being a statesman anymore, being the middle ground that several different groups come to when they're diverging on topics to find a middle ground. One of the things I've been working on is tools to help enable that.

Often strong leadership is identified with a politician forcing through what they think is best, despite opposition. However in a democracy I see the role leadership as arguing strongly for you believe in, but then letting the people have the final say.

I'm actually in favour of having each (lower-house) representative run regular referenda within their electorates to determine their vote in the legislature. In each referendum the representative is given one proxy vote for each constituent who didn't cast a ballot, preventing control by a vocal minority.

To allow constituents to debate and be informed about issues, without the information overload talked about in the article, a system like my Make the Case site could be used to build and preserve a closely-argued community memory on important topics.

I can find and absorb information through transcripts much faster and more reliably than by watching or listening to a lecture. The way material is presented can be enlightening or entertaining, but this is usually when the aim is entertainment rather than learning.

The most important part of an oral presentation is the post-lecture question and answer session. Oral debate does allow for rapid to and fro, though usually the thoughts presented are more shallow and half-baked than is the case for written debates. I've written more about this here.

I think rather than working on a schedule, debates should have long lives through use of an ongoing forum which is linked to a wiki summary of the respective pro and con cases, each case overseen by a group of editors.

In this respect, check out: makethecase.net.

Wikis are good at giving a group consensus opinion, but they're a poor way of showing someone all sides of an issue.

MakeTheCase.net uses a two-column Wiki to show pro and con cases for controversial topics alongside each other. In this way each case progressively improves as they face off.

Each topic has an attached forum for discussion, and the Wiki cases can be viewed at multiple levels of detail, allowing some to get a quick overview of the main issues, and for others to use it as a "forum memory" for some of the finer points of contention.

I am very interested in how to portray conflicting views though. Maybe each article should have links to the related discussions? Or you could use DHTML to hide much of the discussion behind every paragraph, then choose the view you want to see.

How about the conflicting views being displayed alongside each other like referendum pro and con cases? Each of these views would be iteratively edited (and improved) by separate moderating teams, driven by discussion in associated forums. As you say, you can have links between the discussion forums and the case documents (which represent the "forum memory").

And yes, different layers of detail can be exposed to allow both newcomers to familiarize themselves with the core arguments of each side, and for the debating teams of editors to engage on each fine point of contention.

I implemented both these concepts at my Makethecase.net site.

One solution to the edit-wars problem is to have separately-edited and moderated pro and con cases, displayed alongside each other, point-by-point. In this way the cross-border interaction leads to iterative improvements in each of the cases.

A solution to the information overload problem is to have the information both presented and discussed/edited at a hierarchy of detail levels.

Both these are implemented at Makethecase.net.

There is no such thing as information overload. All you have to do is narrow your search, or re-evaluate what you thought you were looking for. Because the tools are more powerful, they require more thought to use effectively. Not an astounding surprise there.

Suppose you're not looking for something narrow, but instead what a summary of the state of a debate on an issue, at a particular level of detail. The problem is that the strong points of each side of a debate are either (1), diffusely spread (over for example many Slashdot comments and many Slashdot stories), or (2), are presented as a summary that cannot simultaneously be both comprehensive and easy to digest (for those wanting a quick or simple introduction to the debate) and which does not provide an clear and easy way for opposite sides of the debate to have a point by point engagement (Wikipedia for example).

Features like comment moderation help, but information overload means that moderation only properly works for comments posted in the first few hours of a debate. Good points are often buried in noise.

What is needed is an online forum which provides both a permanent memory of the state of various debates, which is able to present the debate at multiple levels of detail, and which forces the various perspectives on the issue under debate to face off point by point so that weak and irrelevent points are exposed and forced out.

My attempt at this is makethecase.net. The main page needs some major prettification, but here is the "About" page, and here is my essay explaining why I think something like this is needed.

There is no such thing as information overload. All you have to do is narrow your search, or re-evaluate what you thought you were looking for. Because the tools are more powerful, they require more thought to use effectively. Not an astounding surprise there.

Suppose you're not looking for something narrow, but instead what a summary of the state of a debate on an issue, at a particular level of detail. The problem is that the strong points of each side of a debate are either (1), diffusely spread (over for example many Slashdot comments and many Slashdot stories), or (2), are presented as a summary that cannot simultaneously be both comprehensive and easy to digest (for those wanting a quick or simple introduction to the debate) and which does not provide an clear and easy way for opposite sides of the debate to have a point by point engagement (Wikipedia for example).

Features like comment moderation help, but information overload means that moderation only properly works for comments posted in the first few hours of a debate. Good points are often buried in noise.

What is needed is an online forum which provides both a permanent memory of the state of various debates, which is able to present the debate at multiple levels of detail, and which forces the various perspectives on the issue under debate to face off point by point so that weak and irrelevent points are exposed and forced out.

My attempt at this is makethecase.net. The main page needs some major prettification, but here is the "About" page, and here is my essay explaining why I think something like this is needed.

There is no such thing as information overload. All you have to do is narrow your search, or re-evaluate what you thought you were looking for. Because the tools are more powerful, they require more thought to use effectively. Not an astounding surprise there.

Suppose you're not looking for something narrow, but instead what a summary of the state of a debate on an issue, at a particular level of detail. The problem is that the strong points of each side of a debate are either (1), diffusely spread (over for example many Slashdot comments and many Slashdot stories), or (2), are presented as a summary that cannot simultaneously be both comprehensive and easy to digest (for those wanting a quick or simple introduction to the debate) and which does not provide an clear and easy way for opposite sides of the debate to have a point by point engagement (Wikipedia for example).

Features like comment moderation help, but information overload means that moderation only properly works for comments posted in the first few hours of a debate. Good points are often buried in noise.

What is needed is an online forum which provides both a permanent memory of the state of various debates, which is able to present the debate at multiple levels of detail, and which forces the various perspectives on the issue under debate to face off point by point so that weak and irrelevent points are exposed and forced out.

My attempt at this is makethecase.net. The main page needs some major prettification, but here is the "About" page, and here is my essay explaining why I think something like this is needed.

Ha! You're right, the site should be eating its own dog food and puting the case for its own existence in the case database.

But the way the site works would require either someone who disagrees with at least some of my points, or one who can play devil's advocate, to be appointed as editor of the con case in order that the points can be rebutted.

But I'll go ahead and convert the about section to case form.

Do you think the concept is worthwhile Pejorian?

The ability to post online comments on newspaper articles is becomming increasingly common, but there's no interactivity going on if the journalist does not participate in the debate. Unfortunately the current mode of operation of journalists and commentators is to write their piece and move straight on to something else. Rob did the same thing. He did not participate in the debate on his piece, though he did warn us with his ex-cathedra tag.

We need a system that allows for extended debate without the problems caused by information overload. My solution is here.

There are another kind of collaborative work, that is the process of discussing something. Is not announcing, nor defining, but a lot of people talking around something interchanging points of view, giving new data, etc. Usenet, forums, comments attached to wiki pages or blog entries, even this very discussion, are examples of this third kind of online collaboration. In the discussion you maybe not reach a "conclusion", is not part of the forum itself (but someone could extract what he interprets as a conclusion on some topic and post it in i.e. a wiki page), is the discussion what is the final objective.

There are another kind of collaborative work, that is the process of discussing something. Is not announcing, nor defining, but a lot of people talking around something interchanging points of view, giving new data, etc. Usenet, forums, comments attached to wiki pages or blog entries, even this very discussion, are examples of this third kind of online collaboration. In the discussion you maybe not reach a "conclusion", is not part of the forum itself (but someone could extract what he interprets as a conclusion on some topic and post it in i.e. a wiki page), is the discussion what is the final objective.