YourView

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YourView was an Australian not-for-profit debate site launched in May 2012 and based in Melbourne. It followed ideas from deliberative democracy, aiming to foster thoughtful, constructive discussion on political and social issues to help form a collective view.

The project was run by the OurView Foundation, founded in 2011 by philosopher Tim van Gelder with public intellectual Paul Monk, and funded by voluntary donations. It was run by volunteers in Melbourne.

How it worked: users would vote yes or no on a current issue, then post comments to explain their position. Each debate started with an explainer that outlined the issue and key arguments. To encourage quality contributions, YourView used a credibility score for each user, based on “epistemic virtues.” The final result combined the initial vote with these credibility scores to create a “collective wisdom” measure, rather than simply tallying votes. Some details about what affected the scores were not published to prevent gaming the system.

Current status: inactive and on hold.