Open Debates

Abstract

Technology has fundamentally changed how we communicate with each other. New tools and platforms allow us to share our stories more vibrantly than ever before. In this chapter, we focus on a cornerstone of discourse: debates. We build a Jekyll-based debate platform that can leverage the full capabilities of GitHub to host open debates. We begin with an introduction to the debate platform and the rules of an Oxford-style debate. After that, we provide an in-depth overview of GitHub and all of its features, including some features of GitHub Pages that we have not yet had a chance to cover. We then create a prototype based on the rules to help us find a theme. When we have found a suitable theme and understood the requirements for this project, we can start editing the theme to obtain our final debate platform. Finally, we end this chapter with a discussion of how our platform can take advantage of the open standards and use them in conducting the debates.