Update: Gathering Info

Hey Everyone.

Tomorrow I'm going to publish a mega-post about DebateThis. All of its features, positives, negatives, targets, goals, yada. So far, Christina has contributed to the research and has emailed me a few of her thoughts and concerns:

"Hey Steve,
I just wanted to check-in with you about some ideas I had about
DebateThis. If I seem a little nit-picky it's just because I want to
figure out the potential problems now instead of down the road when we're
stuck...

First off, I don't think Micah's idea should be crammed into this idea
unless it's a tiny accessory on the site. The two ideas seem to be aimed
at different things, I don't see a natural connection between the two...

Also, we will need a news organization to run this in the real world, and
I see the appeal of them wanting a 'DebateThis' button on the bottom of
the article, but not any appeal in maintaining the DebateThis site itself
if it's going to take people away from the news organization's site. (evil
$$)

Back when this project started I worked on a debate site idea, and one of
the problems I had was that the community that we create is going to
decide what it wants... and it may totally stray from debate. What if
people just post jokes or irresponsible/unresearched info?

I also worry about the whole 'senior point earner' system. It'll be a
great way to spark competition when the site is new, but once it becomes
established, I worry that new-commers will see how much work they have to
do to gain recognition and get discouraged and leave. Also, we're
assuming that people are going to want to debate multiple things. I think
it is likely that there are people only interested in one debate issue
(ex. Abortion may be important to them, but not the war in Iraq) How do we
make the site appeal to them if they have no desire for the social fame?

I'm not really sure where we go from here. We should talk about the
step-by-step experience a user goes through when they visit the site. If
you want to post this all to the blog to get other people to comment on
what I wrote here, that's cool too."

If anyone wants to join team DebateThis or has other concerns, thoughts or ideas... please let me know before early tomorrow evening.

Thanks guys.