Welcome to Boulder's first online debate and thank you candidates for participating. And welcome and thank you to everyone viewing this. We're trying something new here and the participating candidates deserve a big thank you for trying this.
The structure of this debate is designed to allow all to "talk" at the same time while keeping with the debate framework where they are given the question and must answer immediately and in a limited time frame. Here's how it will work:
- The first question will be posted at 7:00 pm.
- A question is emailed to all the candidates and posted to this blog.
- Therefore, you will first see just the question and then about 5 minutes later, if you refresh your browser, you will see the candidate answers added, and the next question.
- Each candidate must respond within 5 minutes, answering on their own, and in under 300 words.
- Answers are emailed to me and I then add all of the answers to the question at the same time and post that to the blog. So every candidate answers before seeing the answers of the other candidates.
- The next question is emailed/posted.
Some questions came from suggestions posted to this blog. Others are questions I came up with. There are a total of 11 questions. Selecting which questions was difficult. I tried to find the 11 questions that best fit the format of this debate (can be read and answered in 5 minutes and 300 words), were of a wide interest, and would provide new information on the candidates. There were about 20 questions that fit those criteria and picking from those was painful.
All candidates except Adam Massey originally agreed to participate in this debate. For those that subsequently dropped out, I invite you to contact them as to why.
If you have comments about the debate in general, please post them to this entry. I would like feedback on how good it was, what could be done better, etc.
If you have comments on any specific question, please post them in the comments for that question. And thank you everyone for watching the debate.
