Telegraph's Debate2010 site
The Telegraph has launched a new site to crowdsource ideas and encourage reader interaction with its coverage of politics and party policies ahead of the UK general election.

Debate2010 will feature topics for discussion, posted by the site's editorial team, relating to general policy areas, such as business, defence and economics. Users will then be able to submit their ideas in response to these questions posed by the debate team and vote for or against others' suggestions.

The site's homepage will flag up the 'hottest' topics being discussed on Debate2010 and users will be given an overview of the voting and key contributions to the debates debate on each channel's landing page. Each policy area will have at least one debate taking place.

The new tool could be described as an attempt to map the issues of the general election from the voters' point of view, Telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren said at an event launching Debate2010.

"It's a real-time opinion poll - not a poll of policy intentions, but of policy ideas," he said.

Users who leave shorter, more focused comments will see their responses pushed to the top of debates by moderators to encourage pithy ideas rather than opinions and commentary. Debates will be closed when interest moves on, but can be extended beyond the current three-day time limit if still active.

Deputy editor Benedict Brogan described the site as a work in progress, but said it would offer a new way for readers to navigate through election coverage, helping them to discover useful, threaded discussions of key issues amongst widespread, online chatter.

The site has been developed in partnership with Salesforce.com, the cloud computing company which has previously been used to crowdsource policy ideas for the incoming President Obama and with which the Telegraph has a commercial relationship. Its success will be determined by the level of participation in the debates, from votes to the number of ideas submitted, rather than the level of traffic to the site.

Users will have to register to participate in the site, but this registration will be a new profile, separate from other logins on the Telegraph site, to create a one-off, defined community around this event. Users' data will also be destroyed after the election has taken place.

"Listening to your audience and understanding who you are trying to involve" is an important part of managing Telegraph.co.uk's communities and will be crucial to the success of this project, Kate Day, communities editor at Telegraph.co.uk, told Journalism.co.uk. "In this case it's partly core Telegraph readers and it's partly a whole load of other people who don't come to the Telegraph at the moment or just leave a comment. Part of the reason we wanted this to be a discrete project was so that we could include as wide a selection of people as possible," she said, adding that Telegraph journalists would also be encouraged to contribute.

"Telegraph readers are very used to having opinions. Our communities and social media strategy has all been very focused on opinion rather than citizen journalism. Reader blogs and comments tend to be our strengths rather than people sending us stories (...) I think our users are quite used to sharing their opinions, but what I think we're trying to do in this case is focus that conversation a bit more on policy ideas.

"We also want to steer it away from a lot of people just having a view and make it a comprehensive map of what people think about all sorts of different areas.

Example of a debate topic on Telegraph

Contributions to the debate will be post-moderated and the Telegraph's existing policy for user contributions, such as article comments, should prevent debates from becoming uncivilised or dominated by right-wing topics, said Day.

The editorial team will select debate topics relevant to the news agenda, but also encourage discussion of less well-covered areas. Day hopes the site will expose gaps in political thinking and the views of the electorate.

A Debate2010 Twitter account and Facebook page have been set up to help broaden interest in the site and the range of contributors, and Day said interesting ideas or discussions on these channels relating to topics on the site could be fed back into the site.

The team behind the project is yet to decide what it will do with the data recorded after the general election has taken place, but the contributions made on the site will inform a Citizen's Briefing Book on the key policy areas for the next government.

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