Real Debate

Summary

Making right decisions quickly is key to everything we do. However, any analytical decision process will generally lead to suboptimal results and take longer without an effective formal structure for assessing the situation, evidence, and argumentation.

Real Debate is a structured discussion platform that enables participants to arrive at the best choice efficiently. It allows to carry out rigorous and democratic discussions and computes the best outcome using an advanced weighted rating system.

Problem

Quote: "Any simple problem can be made worse if enough meetings are held to discuss it."

It seems evident that for a decision that requires any significant analysis a certain degree of rigor and formal structure should be used. Just like computers are a great help during complex (or even not so complex) calculations, they can help us compute a decision based on specified parameters. Moreover, they can help us take into account analysis by multiple participants consistently and without bias.

The traditional group meeting paradigm is a subject of many jokes for a reason. Virtual discussions conducted in forums or by email suffer from similar issues as well. What’s needed is a structured discussion platform that allows to formally define the discussion objectives and constraints as well as formally evaluate the available evidence and argumentation.

Solution

The proposed platform is a discussion forum with the following additional features:

Topic definition

Discussions often last longer than necessary because of misunderstandings, which can start at the very beginning. Sometimes people argue simply because they understood the issue differently. That’s why it’s important from the start to clearly define what the topic is. Often a topic is actually a composition of several issues that should be treated one at a time.

This feature allows to define and agree upon the topic of the discussion. If there’s more than one issue or variation at hand, a simple vote will allow users to choose the topic and proceed with the discussion.

Related topics

Links can be created to sub-topics, equivalent topics (doubles), or other topics that can be relevant (these can be suggested automatically using text analytics).

Explicit hypotheses

It’s important in a structured discussion to clearly identify the possible hypotheses. A hypothesis is a possible avenue of discussion, such as an answer or an opinion. To save time, it’s important to eliminate double hypotheses. If the double is detected too late (e.g., in a large forum discussion) it’s important to be able to merge the two hypotheses if the participants agree.

Comment types

Participants can comment on any discussion statement, including other comments. Since a discussion follows the typical hierarchical tree model, a discussion statement always applies to another preceding statement (the topic, a hypothesis, or a comment). There are 3 comment types that are explicitly identified:

·        Clarification comments point out problems with the meaning of a statement or suggest an alternative formulation. A clarification comment has an acceptance property whose value indicates whether the commented statement is acceptable but can be improved as suggested, or is unacceptable unless modified (Accept/Reject). An overall rejection threshold can be set to specify the percent of participants rejecting a statement that would be required in order to make the statement invalid.

·        Argumentation comments point out problems in the logical or factual validity and relevance of a statement in relation to the preceding statement. 

·        Evidence comments propose evidence that either supports or rejects the hypothesis. An evidence comment has a required relevance property whose value indicates whether the evidence supports or contradicts the commented statement (Pro/Con). An evidence comment also has a 0-4 rating parameter which any participant can use to rate the strength of the proposed evidence. The strength of the evidence depends on two things: its estimated accuracy and its relevance to the statement. The parameter then reflects the average rating. If the rating is less than 4, participants must explain any issues they observe using an argumentation comment. Finally, an evidence comment also has the reference source parameter that must explicitly identify the source of the indicated evidence. Note that the same reference source can be used as evidence in multiple places in a discussion. Evidence comments that use the same reference source can be inter-linked, manually and automatically, in order to coordinate the evidence evaluation across multiple places of a discussion.

To avoid confusion, only a single problem or a piece of evidence can be reported in a comment whenever possible (an argumentation comment linked to an evidence rating may contain multiple problems).

Automatic computation of the relative hypothesis strength

A sophisticated configurable algorithm is used to automatically calculate the relative strengths of the presented hypotheses based on the provided comments. A weight is computed for each discussion statement that takes into account unresolved clarification and argumentation comments as well as the combined rating of the evidence comments. 

The algorithm also computes ratings for each participant which are then used to adjust the weight of their statements.

If, nevertheless, the algorithm yields an insignificant difference between two hypotheses, the decision can be taken using a simple vote.

Decision criteria

It may be that each hypothesis must be evaluated along specific axes. In such a case, the axes can be defined in a single place and then applied for all the hypotheses.

Another possibility is to constraint the discussion duration based on time or on the relative hypothesis strength (i.e., to define a margin by which one hypothesis has to win in order for the discussion to be finished).

Although the above features may seem too complex from the description, I believe that a good design can make the platform accessible to the majority of current forum users.

Market overview

Online discussion forums have existed from the start of the Web. Forums 2.0 improved on the simple message hierarchy by adding more structure and formalism. Forums such as Get Satisfaction, Stack Overflow, and Quora have become very popular because their content is easier to search and understand. Real Debate takes this idea further.

There exist numerous forum platforms officially dedicated to debates (many are listed in this review). However, they originate from the face-to-face debate tradition of opponents deciding the winner between two alternatives. So their definition of debate is generally too restrictive. As a result, these platforms have not been nearly as popular as the ones cited above (they are invisible on Google Trends).

There are many open-source forum platforms available that can serve as the basis for the first Real Debate MVP (Minimal Viable Product). The objective of the MVP is to demonstrate the two primary advantages of the system: 1) clarity of the debate, and 2) precision of the automated hypothesis ranking.

What about a risk that an established solution will implement missing features and put Real Debate out of business? This is highly unlikely. Real Debate goes well beyond the relatively simple Q&A forum model of Quora and Stack Overflow. They would need to release and launch an entirely new product to compete with Real Debate. If Real Debate takes traction, it would be able to corner the market before major competitors emerge, just like Quora and Stack Overflow have done in their sectors.

Business model

Real Debate comes in two flavors:

1. A hosted forum platform, where any registered user can start a private or a public discussion
2. A white-label forum solution, either hosted or stand-alone.

In either case, the most obvious business model seems to be « freemium ». A basic free version would be supported by advertisement, with multiple additional options available for a fee.

Go-to-market strategy

To get initial visibility, it would make sense to start with the hosted forum platform before launching the white-label solution. The hosted platform can be used to host public debates on hot topics of the day (e.g., global warming). This could quickly raise the visibility of the platform. Participants can be recruited from ongoing online discussions that mostly do not lead to any kind of consensus or conclusions.

Another way to raise the platform visibility is to promote it in communities where structured debate would bring the most obvious value and in which the audience is highly accustomed to in-depth debates. Such communities are found in a variety of domains such as law, science, medicine, journalism, history, philosophy, politics, business, and sports. Particularly noteworthy are legal proceedings, as well as scientific and philosophical debates. While the participants in these domains are well-trained in formal structured debates, they lack the tools to carry them out efficiently (I can attest to that as an ex-scientist).