DebateHub is another of the software components of the CATALYST ecosystem of Collective Intelligence Technologies aimed at supporting innovative online deliberation processes.

Developed by the Open University, this online deliberation tool is based on an intuitive interface for large-scale argumentation, and advanced visualisations to support sensemaking, attention mediation and community moderation. Its aims are to:

• Raise issues;
• Share ideas;
• Debate the pros and cons;
• Vote contributions in order to collectively organise and progress good ideas forward.

For Community Members:

Debate Hub helps you share new ideas, but also opens them up for debate. This helps you make the case for your viewpoint, and identify the most robust ideas in all the noise.

For Community Managers:

Debate Hub provides new tools to organise your community’s contributions, reduces idea duplication, and supports content analysis and summarisation. The analytics dashboard onto your groups helps you spot connections between people and ideas, detect gaps in knowledge, discover new patterns of (dis)agreement, and produce visual summaries of the community debate.

DebateHub provides an intuitive linear interface for data entry. People can contribute to building argument maps by filling in different text boxes in the context of the same webpage. A two-column interface with colored column’s titles (For and Against) is used as visual metaphor to associate positive and negative semantics to arguments.

DebateHub, as well as other CATALYST CI technologies, is meant to be distinctive in its use of advanced analytics and visualisations to show the best argued ideas, the state and progress of the debate and the level of engagement of the online community.

For more information, please visit the DebateHub website, read the related deliverables or visit our YouTube Channel for demos and tutorials!