Click here or on "View Gallery" to launch Debate: Women: would you ask? Men: do you want to be asked?
They intervened in differing ways depending on whether they were acting as representatives of the arrondissement (as opposed to the Paris City Council, for example), as sponsors of a local project that they wished to defend, or as chairmen/coordinators of a neighbourhood council (in which case they attempted to launch debate).
It's hardly the first website for political debate — over the past few years, I've talked to several companies trying to launch debate platforms, most recently Politix, the politics-focused service from forum company Topix.
Yesterday, the universities secretary, John Denham, invited towns and cities to bid for new university campuses and centres of higher education, after launching a debate over the future of the sector on Friday.
Launching the debate, a computer scientist, Dr Peter Capon of Manchester diocese, said: "We wish to refute the perception that you have to choose between science and faith … the crude caricature of faith as being blind and irrational.
Launching the debate entitled simply "Secularity" before 200 guests and scores of journalists, UMP leader Jean-Francois Cope defended the idea of holding it at all.
The launch debate showed that there are already many answers in the making – if they are only allowed space to surface.
The launch debate for a new participatory social policy text, All Our Welfare, highlighted that there really are alternatives, both to old-style welfare state and current neoliberal privatising welfare reform.
The product, which officially launched its debate platform app on the App Store today, uses short presidential debate-style videos to elevate the discussion around controversial topics.
And on Friday morning May launched the debate with chutzpah.
