What started out as a trickle has been turning into a flood: it seems that every “media property” I go to on the web is inviting readers to comment and contribute, or to use the favored term “join the conversation.” While it seems like an easy and sensible thing to do, the bigger and more popular a site gets the more difficult it is to really create any value from it. We’ve all seen it before – go to almost any major newspaper, magazine, or sports website and the comments section (which is often the beginning and the end of the mass collaboration strategy) tends to be closer to “incoherent mess” then “thoughtful contribution.”

However, there is one particularly notable exception that I greatly enjoy. The Economist is immensily popular, and it has a debate series online, sponsored by Computer Associates. The current topic is Debating Freedom and its digital disconnects. The Oxford-style debate has a monitor (an Executive Editor from The Economist). The proposition security in the modern age cannot be established without erosion of individual privacy has been put forward, and a single expert on each of the PRO and CON sides of the argument present the opening statement (day one), rebuttal (day five), and closing (day eight) for their case. Logged in community members can then comment and contribute to the debate, while realtime voting results are also presented. In many cases I have found the comments at least as interesting as the formal arguments, and I of course keep my eye out for commentary from the featured guest participants.

Now I’m still working out a framework (and perhaps a remarkably fancy looking diagram) in an attempt to crystallize my thoughts on why this offering works so well, at least in comparison to many other sites that try to engage their readers in the co-creation of value and fail miserably. It’s something about the way the expert and community contributions blend together, the competitive and combative debate aspect, exact (and short) statements to respond to, that the debate and comments are well-moderated, that only Economist.com subscribers can contribute (a natural filter), and that the multi-step process incents you to get involved and keep coming back.

But regardless of how my fancy picture shakes out, the site appears to be an excellent example of effectively getting a mob of readers to “join the conversation” in a way that creates value, and besides that it is just an absolutely excellent debate series to engage in and I wanted to highlight it here. By the way – in response to the current proposition, team “Vote Con” is winning handily.