Debate mapper/goals

Overall

 * The debate mapper must enforce the rules of structured debate.
 * As much as possible, the system should be set up so that no individual has any more power than any other. There will always need to be sysops, of course, but they should not have to intervene except under extraordinary circumstances of obvious spamming or other overtly bad behavior. Creating mechanisms to deal with bad behavior will be one of the main challenges; see below.

Interface
Ideally, a structured debate is represented in a manner which provides visual cues for:
 * which side of the argument is being advocated by a particular piece of text
 * whether a given point has been defeated or called into question
 * the dependency structure (which parent-point is being attacked or defended by any given sub-point)

The interface should make it easy and intuitive for untrained users to add additional points (supporting or countering).

The software should automatically track the status (supported, unanswered/open, or defeated) of each point, in order to minimize the administrative overhead of enforcing the basic debate rules. (There is a potential problem in this, however; see below.)

Usage
In order to be truly useful:
 * A structured debate needs to be part of a system which recognizes it as a valid means of resolving disputes (what David Brin calls an "accountability arena") within some milieu -- even if that milieu is only a small group of people. (The larger the group, however, the more useful and powerful it is to have everyone agreeing, and the more important it is for the outcome they ultimately agree on to be one that is as rational as possible.)
 * It must be possible for any given structured debate to be used as a "point" in another structured debate -- so that:
 * determinations (debate outcomes) affecting multiple issues don't have to be argued over and over again, and so that
 * if the outcome of a debate ever changes due to new information, the logical consequences of that change in understanding will propagate to all the issues affected by it.

Chewbacca participants
The one major problem which seems likely to raise its head is that of an unfriendly participant posting nonsensical arguments which the system will automatically count as valid, thereby requiring a counter. Although countering them may be just as quick as creating them (e.g. "This is nonsensical"), the argument's visual presentation could be rapidly overwhelmed by the nonsense-and-counters and become practically unreadable.

There are several possibilities for dealing with this. An obvious one, which may be the best solution, is to offer the option to vote on comment relevance; comments below a certain threshhold (which each user may set for her/himself) are automatically hidden/suppressed.

Another is to allow voting comments as spam, with something resembling karma-point penalties for posting spam comments.

Quote mapping
Another, somewhat less thorny problem is involved in the process of "mapping" an existing freeform debate into a structured debate. Claims in freeform format are often tightly bundled together and need to be "unrolled" and disambiguated. What we need is some way to take the original quote, mark it up with the claims it seems to represent, and then insert those claims into the structure of the argument while referencing the original quote.

A semi-obvious way of dealing with this is simply to treat quotes as sources. This does open up the question, however, of how to handle authoritativeness and misrepresentation; perhaps "source" needs to be a data entity understood by the system, and sources whose claims are repeatedly contradicted need to have a lower "authority" score than sources whose claims are not, or whose claims are repeatedly confirmed by other sources. Although this makes the programming substantially more complicated, tentatively it would seem a worthwhile thing to spend significant time on (perhaps not in the first version, however).

Questions
Debaters need to be able to pose questions which somehow hold up the ultimate decision until answered satisfactorily. It should be possible to display a list of all questions being asked across all debates, allowing researchers who may or may not be otherwise involved in the debates to help find answers.