Debate Coaches Online cont'd

There is, curiously enough, an intersect between some things I’m trying to do on the DJ and the ideas I’ll be kicking around with Bietz. Very interesting, at least to me. Sometimes all of the things one does find some odd synchronicity, at least for a while, before drifting off on their own planes again. This may be a pattern limited to foxes; hedgehogs tend to create a total synchronicity and then inhabit it, as compared to running across one on occasion. This credits neither the hedgehog or the fox mentality, but simply expands the concept. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, mosey on over to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox.)

Anyhow, I’m going to conduct my discussion with MB here, publicly, to pull in any comments as we go along. He has reposted his original Rostrum article that started this discussion on the NDCA blog. He suggests that this page work as our starting point, and that’s fine by me, but I’d want to clean it up a little bit, but before that, I think that we need to round up the usual suspects. I mentioned this before at some point, and someone suggested that this would be a problem (not the rounding up but the reliance upon), but I think I was misunderstood because I used the wrong trope. Usual Suspects normally means the predictable people you see again and again, and this was read as the handful of yakkers you always see everywhere online, which is a sensible reading of the phrase, but not what I intended. It seems to me that there is, across the country, a rather articulate, concerned population of coaches (and others) who, in fact, are seldom heard from publicly about important issues. For this to succeed, we need to engage that population, as contributors. Once that is done, people paying attention to what is said should follow.

But there is probably even a step before that, and this is actually the Usual Suspects in the usual reading. Keep in mind, this is only a starting point, but, who else has a blog out there that is devoted specifically to debate issues or mostly debate issues? I follow, among others, CP and Ryan Ricard and Bietz via NDCA (and regularly repost them through the Coachean Feed). Do we have a list, as comprehensive as possible, of all the people who are already doing what we’re talking about? Obviously, that small group could be the seed of a coordinated project. I think MB did some of this aggregation on VBD at some point, and I know there was someone else (I can’t remember who, because I stopped following it when I was the one mostly aggregated, which was, uh, aggravating). So, big question number one: what do we have already? Let’s get this elite corps organized first!

(Needless to say, MB should repost this on debatecoaches.org, but that is a clumsy process. We probably need to open direct access to people—and I would say a lot of people, albeit maintaining moderation. We’ll get to that eventually.)