An Idea for Political Party Forums

[danarhea]

Actually, not my idea. I stole it from the last board I was on. LOL.

A forum for political parties, with a subforum for each of the major parties, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Constitutionalist, Green, and others for those who are members of other political parties. Only members of a specific political party may use the subforum for that party.

Party leaders would be elected by members of each subforum, and the elected leaders of each respective political party would moderate their own subforum. The idea that I am adding is that the regular moderators would also moderate the subforums to keep everything honest. One problem with the last board I was on is that in one of the subforums, the leader and his members use the subforum to plan mass personal attacks, or "hits", on others, who they decide should become targets, due to difference in ideology, or that they disagree with them in the main forums. That is the reason why, if this is implemented, the regular moderators should also moderate the subforums here.

Except for the problem I mentioned above, the concept works rather well at that last board I was on.

[vauge]

My take is that in order to understand the other position, communication must be open and free flowing. Hopefully, the quality members here help to create that insightful and meaningful discourse. It litterally gives me goose bumps when I see a thread with liberals, socialists, libertarians, and conservatives pounding on each other in well spirited (and often) educational civil debate. Some other admins believe that it isn't possible to maintain this without folks loosing limbs. So far, we have been successful with only a few scrapes and bruises.

I am not totally against this idea, we had something very similar in the past. Only X usergroup can start threads in Y forum - anyone could respond. It became the very common gross minded "us against them" feel that did not encourage discussion but fostered singular positions with unwelcome rhetoric.

One question - How could we implement this on a new level while being unique and maintaining an open and free discussion?

[danarhea]

Originally Posted by vauge

My take is that in order to understand the other position, communication must be open and free flowing. Hopefully, the quality members here help to create that insightful and meaningful discourse. It litterally gives me goose bumps when I see a thread with liberals, socialists, libertarians, and conservatives pounding on each other in well spirited (and often) educational civil debate. Some other admins believe that it isn't possible to maintain this without folks loosing limbs. So far, we have been successful with only a few scrapes and bruises.

I am not totally against this idea, we had something very similar in the past. Only X usergroup can start threads in Y forum - anyone could respond. It became the very common gross minded "us against them" feel that did not encourage discussion but fostered singular positions with unwelcome rhetoric.

One question - How could we implement this on a new level while being unique and maintaining an open and free discussion?

For example, I was a member of the Libertarian forum. We discussed issues unique to Libertarianism. You might not be aware of this, but Libertarians are noted for not agreeing with each other on a wide variety of issues, so discussing these issues from a Libertarian perspective helped to unite us on where we had common ground. Likewise, the idea of the Republican, Democratic, and other forums was for their members to discuss issues unique to thier parties also. For instance, not all Republicans support Bush, but do find common ground on some of his policies. Likewise, there is a split in the democratic party, and the party HQ is used to hammer out those differences. Also, the party headquarters served the purpose for the members to hammer out talking points for use in the general forum, and when the content for discussion is thought out in a group mode, and then applied to debate in the general forums, you end up with extremely interesting and close debates. From what I saw, other than some misuse, which I discussed earlier in the thread, the forums did not detract from the debates in the main forums, but rather enhanced them.