Lucy does some 'splaining: April 2010

So I've mentioned before that I'm a computer programmer by day. One of my favorite resources for making my job easier is called Stack Overflow. It's a site where programmers can ask questions for other programmers. Go click around there for a while. You probably won't understand some of the jargon, but notice how the question-and-answer format encourages meaningful information exchange. You get great answers to newbie questions, and you get great answers to difficult questions. As users ask good questions and provide good answers, they get "reputation points" that allow them some additional privileges on the site, making the community largely self-policing. The best part is, many of these awesome answers end up at the top of Google searches, making the entire internet a better place.

I think that it'd be awesome to have a site like this for debaters. The constant influx of new debaters and coaches means that the community always has plenty of questions, and right now those answers are scattered around the internet and often buried under flamewars, off-topic discussion, and misinformation. (Ever tried reading the wikipedia page on policy debate?). If we had a place where "experts" in the community could easily exchange information, it might be just a little bit easier to learn debate or start a debate team.

And what do you know? The creators of Stack Overflow are starting a new project to open up their software to other communities who would like a knowledge exchange site. I've typed up a proposal for a debate knowledge exchange, but we'll only get the blessing of Stack Exchange if we show that there is existing community support for this idea.

So, if you think that my proposal is a decent idea, that a knowledge exchange for debaters could make the internet a better place, I might suggest you do the following: