I can’t say a whole lot about this because it’s very early in the beta, but the dialogues at RedBlueUS.org are underway and going strong.

Here’s what I can say:

RedBlueUS.org matches up folks that are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, guiding them through a one-on-one dialogue with a number of “virtual facilitation” tools built-in. It’s designed to help people have productive dialogues with those they might not otherwise agree with, or talk to at all in a civil manner.

Kudos to my employer for letting me be the lead on such a cool project.

The nerdy stuff

• Built in Rails 1.1.6,
• Backed with a Postgres database,
• Hosted on a Centos linux box,
• Using mongrel and apache 2.2 in a proxied backend/frontend setup,

So far, an apache frontend and mongrel backend is an elegant and high performance Rails deployment option. I’m very happy with it.

Features

A “dialogue” consists of two users talking about three topics. Each topic has three major phases -

1. Moderator-posed “Opening questions”,
2. A more free-form back-and-forth where users get to ask questions and respond to each other,
3. Closing comments and a survey about the experience.

At various points, a user can use a dHTML (via prototype.js) “virtual facilitator” that helps them form productive, non-confrontational responses, sort of like having a mediator in the conversation with them.

User “temperatures” are taken at various points to see how satisfied and/or upset folks are with the dialogue process.

Users get email notifications about actions their partner has taken, to ensure folks keep the dialogue going. Users get to define how long a dialogue continues by mutually agreeing to end it.

There’s a wiki-like content management system that lets the client manage content without touching code.

The application is built to guide users through a facilitated one-on-one dialogue, with each action contingent on a number of other actions and criteria.

Thoughts

I really like rails.

Being able to create a set of inter-related objects (and then configuring Postgres to enforce those relationships) in a clean MVC framework made it very easy to create a pretty complicated application and still keep the complexity in check.

I really like this project.

As far as I’m aware, nothing like this is being done online anywhere – pulling users with disparate political views together into a structured but flexible dialogue process.

Having been a non-partisan political organizer with the PIRGS and then a free software-based web developer for the last 7 years or so, this pulls together a whole bunch of stuff I’m interested in one nice little bundle.

Virtually-facilitated online dialogue is a complicated beast – let’s hope we get some great feedback from the beta. Thanks, testers!