The Debate Process
Table of contents
The Debate Workflow
A debate on debate.club moves through four stages:
Lobby >> Preparation >> Debate >> Evaluation
The platform creates the rooms for each stage, routes participants into them, and handles the video and state transitions. Participants and adjudicators can focus on the discussion itself.
Moving Between Stages
Stage changes are announced before they happen. A banner counts down in the room you are about to leave:
- Preparation is over — entering the Debate room in ~5s
- The last speech is over — entering the Evaluation room in ~5s
- Evaluation started — returning home in ~5s
A short Entering the … room notice then appears at the top of the screen while the new room loads. You do not have to do anything; the switch happens on its own.
While the Debate Room is closing, the speech timer and its controls are frozen so a stray click cannot restart the clock in a room that is about to disappear.
The Organizer of the Debate
For an invite-only debate, whoever creates the debate becomes the Organizer. The Organizer invites the other participants, assigns each of them a role (including themselves), and starts the Preparation stage once the team is ready.
Once the Preparation stage begins, the Organizer takes on whatever role they assigned themselves (e.g. Prime Minister or Adjudicator). From that point on, the workflow is driven by the Adjudicators — including the Organizer if they assigned themselves the Adjudicator role.
For an Open Debate, the debate.club team is the Organizer but does not take part in the debate itself. Roles are assigned automatically from the sign-up order, and the workflow is driven by the adjudicators who signed up.
Some debates have an AI adjudicator in the chair. There the AI drives the workflow instead of a human: it moves the debate between stages and manages the speaking order. Everything else on this page works the same way.
The Role of Adjudicators
Anyone assigned the Adjudicator role can perform the following actions during the debate:
- In the Preparation stage:
- Enter and leave team preparation rooms
- Pause or resume the preparation timer
- Start the Debate stage
- In the Debate stage:
- Select the next speaker
- Start a speech, if the speaker does not start it themselves
- Pause, resume, or stop the speech timer while a speech is in progress
- Start the Evaluation stage
- In the Evaluation stage:
- Fill in the Ballot — the chair enters the scores, every adjudicator writes their own feedback
- Enter the Adjudicator Room for a private discussion
- Return to the Evaluation Room
Adjudicators can also end a debate at any stage with End debate.
Speeches are normally started by the speaker who holds the floor, not by an adjudicator — see Speaking.