Welcome (robots)!!
Welcome to the (beta-, pre-, soft-, robots only-) launch of IranDebate.org! There's still a lot of work to be done before the grand opening (however I'm defining that) but for now, I've turned the lights on, lit the sign out front, and opened the door to accomodate any web crawlers that pass through. For stylish and intrepid human visitors such as yourself, you can find out more about the project on the about page or jump in at any point in the tree to get a general idea of what is going on here.
This project is part of a larger effort I'm calling the "open debate engine" project, which is an attempt to find a better way to debate and analyze complex policy topics through crowdsourcing. I've been working on this idea for a few years now and the key challenge has always been getting a solid enough base of resources (arguments, citations, etc.) to demonstrate the potential as well as an active topic to facilitate participation. I also intend for the system to be used on a number of different topics and have been testing that through the development by working on multiple topics at once. The first site I launched on this current generation of the platform was UNCLOSDebate.org but IranDebate.org was one of the first topics I started with and is now the second site launched.
The debate over the Iranian nuclear deal is epic in scale and consequence and we still have a lot of work to do to represent it properly. I started this about 3-4 years ago, when the possibility of a nuclear deal was still speculative and Ahmedinjad was in power. The prospects for a new peace have improved dramatically in the past two years but it does mean there are a number of quotes or arguments in the system that need to be updated to reflect the current situation. Additionally, the debate is heating up over the pending nuclear deal (I've postponed the launch of this site as many times as they have the talks but I was determined to get it out before the final deal was reached) and both sides are making challenging, new arguments to bolster their case that we will try to keep up with.
In the end, I hope for this to be a community effort and will post here shortly with a list of ways visitors can help out to make the arguments on both side of the debate as strong as possible. In the meantime, thanks for visiting and for your interest in this project! Please let me know if you have any questions or feedbacks in the comments below or through our contact form.