About

Description
Screenshots
Videos
Acknowledgements
Source Code
Publications

Description

Developed by the Open University’s Knowledge Management Institute, DebateHub is a tool for online communities to: raise issues; share ideas; debate the pros and cons; and prioritise contributions in order to collectively organise and progress good ideas forward. Debate Hub is distinctive in its use of advanced analytics to show the best argued ideas, and visualisations of a community.

Key Features

A grouping mechanism to set up discussion groups.
An intuitive linear interface for argumentation-based discussion
2-D mapping canvases to connect ideas and build argument maps.
New mechanisms to prioritise issues, ideas and arguments
A Moderator toolbar to allow re-structuring and organisation of the debate by merging and splitting ideas and arguments
A Visualisation Dashboard to support community management and sense making of the debate

Public deliberation in complex socio-technical debates is critical, but poorly supported by today’s social media platforms: it is hardly possible for citizens and community managers to quickly grasp the state of a public debate, know where they might best contribute to advance understanding, and effectively identify and pursue socially innovative ideas.

DebateHub is an innovative tool for community deliberation that provides an intuitive interface for large-scale argumentation and advanced analytics and visualisations to enhance sensemaking, attention mediation and community moderation.

DebateHub helps communities to identify the most robust ideas in the noise. It provides a collaboration environment in which ideas can be debated and assessed, in a way that it is not the most popular idea to win, but the one for which the best arguments are brought forward and the best evidence are provided.

DebateHub also supports informed participation to public debates by providing a collective intelligence visualization dashboard consisting of summary analytics and attention mediation feedback. These features support newcomers to get a sense of where is the debate at and where is the best way for them to contribute. The DebateHub Visualization Dashboard is also a tool for community managers to monitor their community, promote attention and prioritize community’s resources and actions.

DebateHub is one of the Catalyst’s ecosystem of Collective Intelligence Tools to improve community deliberation of complex societal challenges.

DebateHub is part of a family of digital technologies developed by the IDea research group (Intelligent Deliberation research group in KMi) and designed to improve collective intelligence and online deliberation is small-to-large collaborating groups. If you are interested to know more about our research, DebateHub and similar tech we are developing please contact the IDea team.

Screenshots

Example of the DebateHub homepage

Example of the DebateHub groups page

Example of the DebateHub debates page

Examples of a DebateHub debate page

Example of a DebateHub debate analytics dashboard page

Example of a DebateHub debate Network Diagram

Example of a DebateHub debate Overview Diagram

Example of a DebateHub debate People and Issue Ring Diagram

Videos

DebateHub Concept Movie

DebateHub intro and argumentation-based discussion Interface

An Introduction to the Collective Intelligence Dashboard

DebateHub Moderation features

Acknowledgements

DebateHub’s design, development and testing was undertaken as part of the FP7 Project Catalyst on Collective Applied Intelligence and Analytics for Social Innovation by the Knowledge Media Institute team at the Open University.

Team

Professor Anna De Liddo
Professor Simon Buckingham-Shum
Michelle Bachler – Software Development
Samantha Colclough – Software Development
Harriett Cornish – Graphics

Source Code

For the source code for the DebateHub website application, please visit our Git Hub: https://github.com/idea-kmi/DebateHub
Note: the software is released under LGPL license.