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"Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has contributed opinion pieces to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Now you'll find her in a less established forum, defending a recent op-ed on a brand new online debate platform called PolicyMic. \nThe site, which co-founders Christopher Altchek and Jake Horowitz launched in June, aims to give people \u2014 20-somethings especially \u2014 a place for intelligent discussion of current events.\n\"After you leave college, there\u2019s not a good place to debate current events,\" Altchek says. \"We started thinking about how everybody gets their current events from news sites, but nobody actually engages there ... [Twitter and Facebook] are both great platforms, but they're not built for meaningful exchange of ideas. On Twitter you are very restricted, and Facebook is hard to have back-and-forth debates that don't get lost.\"\nPolicyMic removes discussions about the news away from news sites \u2014 where commenters are not exactly known for their insightful comments \u2014 and into a community that is somewhat self-curated. When a user first signs up, he or she is limited to 300 characters for their articles. Receiving more \"Mics\" (the equivalent of a Facebook \"Like\") on his or her comments moves the user up the character-count-allotment totem poll. After 150 Mics, the user becomes a \"pundit\" and can publish articles of any length on the site. Pundits can also challenge other users to debates. So far, 450 of 1500 users have reached this level.\nThe site also brings in professors and other thought leaders to write guest articles. Sometimes these authors host \"office hours\" in which they discuss their articles with users. In Rice's case, she responded to one question regarding the op-ed she published in the New York Times.\nPolicyMic is not the only startup that's set out to create a platform for intelligent discussion. TwoSides, Debate.org and Debatewise.com are just a few others. The general tone of the conversation on most of these sites, however, makes it unlikely that Rice will make an appearance.\nPolicyMic has a big advantage: Its co-founders are well connected to thought leaders and intelligent young people who are aligned with both sides of the political aisle. Altcheck used to work for the Bush administration. Horowitz, who shares an alma mater (Stanford) with Rice, was a reporter for left-leaning advocacy site Change.org.\nTogether they've recruited the sort of community that will vote insightful comments to the top of the site and push down the crazies \u2014 producing quality free commentary. The question is whether such a system can scale.\n\"We do get the random crazy people who sign up for our site,\" Altchek says, \"but they get really frustrated because they have a small comment limit and nobody is giving them mics and allowing them to move up. They usually stop commenting.\"\nImage courtesy of Wikimedia Commons"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/10/03/online-political-debate-policymic/>