Debates

General information

Overview

The Debate component allows people to have discussions, without voting nor prioritzation. It also allows to close them, by adding conclusions or a summary of what the discussion was about.

From this starting point, there could be other configurations, such as:

To allow debates creation by participants
To have debates with a fixed started and ending date or open
To show endorsements (public supports) or not

Examples

Some examples of where this component was used:

Propose new functionalities for Decidim software in Metadecidim

Options

To configure the Debate component:

Sign in as admin

Go to admin panel

In the main sidebar, click in the button for the space that you want to configure the component for. For instance, it could be "Processes", "Assemblies" or "Conferences".

Go to components

Click on "Add component" button

Click on "Debate"

Fill the Add component form

Add the component

Field	Type	Description
Name	`Required`	What is the title of this component. For instance, "Debates"
Order position	Optional	Which order will it have in relation to the other debates. Having a lower number means a higher priority. For instance, if you have two debates, "Debate a" with weight "10" and "Debate b" with weight "0", then "Debate b" will be first when ordering.

Field	Type	Description
Scopes enabled	Optional	Check if you want to have Scopes filtering in this component.
Scope	Optional	Which Scope does this component belongs to.
Global scope	Optional
Comments enabled	Optional	Whether you want to have comments in the meetings.
Comments max length	Optional	What is the characters limit that participants will have when making comments. Leave 0 for default value.
Announcement	Optional	A general announcement that’ll be visible on the general debates landing page.

In the cases where the space that this component will be used has Phases, for instance, in Participatory Processes, then you can also define different behaviors per Step.

Field	Type	Description
Endorsements enabled	Optional	Check if you want that participants show public support for these debates.
Endorsements blocked	Optional
Debate creation by participants enabled	Optional	Check if you want to allow the creation of new debates by participants.
Comments blocked	Optional	Whether you want to enable comments for this phase.
Announcement	Optional	A general announcement that’ll be visible on the general debate landing page.

Permissions

An administrator can choose which kind of Authorizations a participant need to have to make certain actions in the debates:

Create
Endorse

Debate types

It’s possible to have two kinds of debates:

Finite: with a start and end date
Open: without a start and end date

This is shown publically in the debate list.

Manage debates

New debate form

Field	Type	Description
Title	`Required`	What is the title of this debate. For instance, "How can we improve this process?"
Description	`Required`	What is the description of this debate.
Instructions to participate	`Required`	Add a message for the participants.
Information updates	Optional	Add a message for the participants.
Debate type	`Required`	Choose between Finite and Open. Finite means that the debate has a starting and ending date and time, Open means that there isn’t any timeframe.
Starts at	`Required` if the debate type is Finite	Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:ii
Ends at	`Required` if the debate type is Finite	Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:ii
Category	Optional	Which category has the debate. Used for filtering in the debates list.