External Process Debates

[Drapionswing]

approved by jas61292

Hey everyone, I'm posting today to talk about a way to help strengthen the debate during a process among other things.

The idea that I've come to propose, suggested by biggie, is during the CAP process we should have scheduled debates for each stage which primarily I saw as a way to strengthen activity in the CAP Room. However when I look at it more I see a lot of positives for doing this, as it should hopefully quality information to TLT to go off of during the process and gives shy newcomers a chance to still get involved with the process without posting on the forum. While we do already debate current stages anyway, it's normally spontaneous and can be easily missed by TLT.

There are some daunting questions about this, such as how we could balance the schedule to not overpower forum presence and timing this appropriately for TLT who would benefit a ton from being around during this. Could this potentially sway voting in a way we don't want?

A structure I've thought of is potentially TL or TLT leading the debates in chat with a fixed topic or just a general debate if that's what they see fit. Once per stage to prevent us from distracting too much from the process.

If you feel any way about this suggestion, post your thoughts so I can see multiple views on this!

 

[Okamu]

Honestly, it's an interesting idea, but I'm just not sure it's practical. Back when I helped run a league on a side server, I was the one who organized league meetings, which covered changing time zones due to DST for people from the UK, US, and SE Asia. It was an absolute nightmare, and I'm fairly certain that the CAP community is larger in size than that. No matter when you schedule it, I feel there just won't be a good time to place it where people aren't going to feel left out due to their time zones. And if a major decision is made during that time? Then you have people feeling they didn't really get a chance to participate in what's supposed to be a democratic process. With scheduling and the potential risks you have, I feel we'd only end up slowing the process down and potentially alienating certain groups of people.

 

[Zephias]

I feel like one of the biggest issues is that CAP in general collects people who have widely different frames of availability, especially when it comes to the regular posters. The advantage of having something like the forum is that if IDK, reachzero posts something at 3:20 my time, I can answer at 16:40 and the conversation will most likely not have moved on.

I think the idea itself has merit, and I do think that live discussion would gleam different insights (live discussion means less time to mull on and prod ideas around, which means people tend to trend towards the more obvious/simple solutions) than something like forum discussion, but I'm wary of it isolating certain members outside of a spot of contribution (for example, someone making a post and receiving an answer the likes of 'we decided we wouldn't do that in the live debate') as well as possibly bothering the Showdown room users who don't really care about the building of the CAP.

I'd say give it a shot, though. Can't harm!