The original question of the VND was for a simple website with contact information and calendar. Instead, I proposed to them to try and start an online platform; a central point for articles, announcements and other information about debate in the Netherlands. That didn't exist yet.

Employees and visitors of debate venues collect and generate a flow of information about social topics, which is not always made well accessible—think of newspaper articles, links, video, research, interviews, reports. On debatcentra.org, such information is gathered, categorized by themes and made accessible to the general public. In addition, announcements are gathered into a central events calendar.

For this project, I wrote the concept and plan of approach. The site is currently a private beta (a test situation with basic functionality). For this first phase, I applied for and have received funding from the Forum for Democratic Development (FDO). In the concept, follow-up phases are formulated, for expanding functionalities and target groups, and for generating active audience participation. The VND edits and manages the site.

The format and layout of the site refers to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Each article shows which member has added it to the site. Each member has a personal profile page, which contains their complete list of contributions.

Next to each article a selection of related articles is displayed, that you can click through on to find out more about a particular subject or theme.

The site logo is a stylized speech balloon containing a full stop. At the same time it refers to the typical location markers that are used in online maps like Google Maps. This combination evokes the idea of a debate center as a physical or digital point for discussion.

debatcentra.org is not aimed at creating original content, but at disclosing and sharing existing information. The site is a so-called aggregator, that automatically imports articles about debate, from selected news. Thus an organic collection of relevant documents is created, which is constantly updated.

Individual members can like articles, and thus colectively determine what is shown on the site. They can also manually add articles, videos and links to the flow of information.

The website consists roughly of three types of pages:
–  Overviews in which multiple documents of a certain category or tag are summarized e.g. the Theme pages, the profile pages;
–  Detail pages containing text, images and videos e.g. the home page;
–  List views in which several documents are presented e.g. the People page, the Organizations page.

You can make selections of documents by related themes, organizations en persons, online sources and document types. By clicking on the title of a document, you open a selection of related documents.

All selections can be viewed as an RSS feed.

The website contains a social network with profiles of all members and member organizations, and comprehensive editorial functionalities.