Debate

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

Some examples of where this component was used:

Propose new functionalities for Decidim software in Metadecidim

Debates listing example Debate example

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 component

Add component form

Table 1. Add component: Debate form
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.

Table 2. Add component: Debate form - Global settings
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.

Table 3. Add component: Debates form - Step settings
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

Manage debates

Manage debates table

Export all

Allows exporting the comments in the debates in different formats.

Comments as CSV
Comments as JSON
Comments as Excel

New debate form

New debate backend form

Table 4. 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.

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.

Debates list Finite debate

Actions

Table 5. Actions
Icon	Name	Definition
	Edit	Edit form for a debate. It’s the same form as "New debate".
	Close	Close form for a debate. For adding conclusions.
	Permissions	To handle the permissions of this debate, depending on the verification a participant has.
	Delete	To delete this debate. Only can be done when there aren’t any projects.