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Debatekeeper — a timekeeper for debate speeches

Debatekeeper is an Android app that times speeches in debates and rings bells automatically at thecorrect times. It supports most parliamentary styles of debating, including British Parliamentary,Australasian, Asian, Australian, American Parliamentary, certain forms of Canadian Parliamentary andall New Zealand styles.

The app rings a bell, vibrates and/or flashes the screen white (or any combination of the three) atbell times. It also rings overtime bells, which are configurable.

A small amount of documentation for this app is athttps://github.com/czlee/debatekeeper/wiki/.

The app isavailable on the Google Play Store.

Version 1.4 was rolled out in June 2023. This update was mostly just to comply with Android'starget API levelrequirements, so that theapp doesn't get pulled from the Play Store. I don't intend to do any other work on Debatekeeper,other than maintaining the newonline formatsrepository (whose main purpose is to make it easierto accept new debate formats without having to update the app) and further target API upd

I would love for someone new to pick up this project and run with it. It's licensed under the GPLv3,so any prospective developer would be bound by those licensing terms. You're welcome to contact meif you have any questions. See thenotes for prospective developersbelow.

This app (and all source code, with exceptions noted below) is licensed under the GNU General PublicLicence version 3. You can find a copy of this licence in the "licence.txt" file, or go tohttp://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.

The exception is the bell sounds. I bought the single bell sound from SFXSource (which appears tobe now defunct), so I can't make it freely available. If you want to contribute and need this file,get in touch with me.

New debate styles should be submitted to the online debate formats repository athttps://github.com/czlee/debatekeeper-formats. Instructions are in that repository.

I've written a page onhow to write a debate format XMLfile. Butit's probably easiest in the first instance to look in theformatsrepository for the XML files there, and modify oneof those.

This app doesn't do the public forum, Lincoln-Douglas or policy debate styles. There are otherAndroid apps that do this. The reason this app can't currently do this is that it doesn't currentlysupport preparation time that can be used by teams between speeches at their election. A discussionof this is inissue #6.

I don't intend to work on this app beyond version 1.3 (October 2021), so if you're interested inhelping with development, I'd love for you to dive in and possibly take over the project. Contact meif you want to discuss anything, or feel free to just fork the repository and get going.

Note: The master branch has legacy support code for version 1.3 that should be removed in the nextversion. I've done this on theremove-legacybranch, so for any non-minor development,please start from that branch (and merge it into master).

To build this project, you'll need to:

1. Check out this repository (and put it somewhere useful)

2. Add the bell sounds, calleddesk_bell.mp3,desk_bell_double.mp3 anddesk_bell_triple.mp3,all to theapp/src/main/res/raw/ directory. The app won't build without a sound file of somesort there. Any sound file will do. I'm happy to provide the file to interested developers, onthe understanding that it isnot available under a free-distribution license (as discussedabove)—contact me at the details below. Of course, future developers may also use other sounds,including more freely available ones, if they can find a satisfactory one.

If you wish to use your own sound files for thedesk_bell*.mp3 files, here is some informationabout them:

• The sound is a desk bell (as the name suggests), also known as a counter bell or call bell.
• The originaldesk_bell.mp3 sound is about 2 seconds long, but this shouldn't in principlematter; there is code that stops any existing playback if a new one needs to be started.
• Thedesk_bell_double.mp3 anddesk_bell_triple.mp3 sounds are just thedesk_bell.mp3 sound,but repeated at an interval of 0.5 seconds. Any sound editing tool should be able to do this; IusedAudacity. The purpose of these files is just to make theinterval more predictable and to avoid abrupt audio stops for common multiple-bell cases.

If you work on a significant update, I'll encourage you to list it under a separate Play Storelisting on your own account. To do this, you'll need to change the package name fromnet.czlee.debatekeeper to something else. Feel free to rename/rebrand it if you like. Don't forgetthat, underthe GPL-3.0, you're required to make yourcode publicly available. Please credit me in your distribution (e.g. in the store listing).

For minor updates, I might consider pull requests and releasing it under the existing Play Storelisting. Just be aware that some pull requests have sat around for several years before I got achance to look at them, and this is likely to be longer in the future.

Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions about how to proceed with this. I'mlikely to take forever with reviewing code, but I should be able to respond to emails about adeveloper transition much more quickly.

You can find my e-mail address by checking out this repository and looking at the commit authors, oralternatively message me on Facebook (czlee) or Twitter (@czczlee).