The Policy Commons is going to need many components in order to achieve the objective of developing and implementing improved public policies.  Greg Schnippel’s Open Debate Engine, described as "a collaborative wiki-like tool for structured debate on a topic," offers many of them. The genius of Greg’s platform is that it makes it possible to conduct collaborative, distributed, rational discussions. 

The Open Debate Engine provides a rhetorical framework allowing interested folks to tackle an important topic, build on kernels of reference information to create an "argument tree" wherein people structure and justify their thinking and engage in discussion (okay, "debate") with others.  Like a wiki, the framework supports many users, is editable, changes are tracked, and back channel discussions are supported.  The system provides flexible syndication which allows content to be widely and easily shared and monitored.

The framework comes from Greg’s many years in competitive debate where teams argue for and against a specific proposition with arguments supported by extensive research.  His prototype at Spacedebate.org offers two "positions" — that the US should or should not weaponize outer space; each position is supported by a series of arguments; and each argument is supported by evidence.  Definitions and reference materials are tracked for verification.  In a competitive debate the judges would decide which team — "for" or "against" — did a better job in making their case.

I’m convinced that the Open Debate Framework will be a boon for debaters and academics as they organize materials for their work.  I can imagine a whole new genre of virtual debate where teams develop websites like Spacedebate.org which judges evaluate to decide who did a better job of structuring arguments, research, and presentation. 

However, debate decides the winner and loser of the whole argument — we should or shouldn’t weaponize space.  For the policy commons our objective is to define and then implement reasonable policies which are likely to be more fine-grained and which we will improve as we learn more.  Thus, we need a "so therefore now we should…" component in the framework – a way to compare arguments, decide which is more compelling, and recommend what we should do given what we know.  

I expect Greg’s already working on this for release 2.0.