by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Ask the President - Raising or Lowering the Debate?
Thanks to Norm, I came across the new Ask the President site that Community Counts are hosting and a range of media organisations including the Nation and the Washington Times are supporting. The idea is to bring a new voice to traditional Presidential news conferences by allowing citizens questions pulled from the net and voted on by citizens. Its a great site and very easy to get involved since you can vote without logging in. Obviously that means that non-US citizens like me can vote (and I did) and there is lots of potential for special interest groups to abuse the site. Looking at the current front-runners, it is interesting and not surprising to see that an anti-bank question/suggestion tops the poll - basically it suggests the Mr Obama should stop giving money to banks and instead release students from their loan debts. The fact that this idea is currently top seems an interesting insight into where (some) people are at, but I am not sure I would want Obama to scrap all his other plans and put it to the top of his list. On the other hand, raising an idea like this might be just as useful a contribution as any other question that might arise from the elite circle of reporters who traditionally attend US Presidential news conferences. What do you think?
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Comments
The predecessor project, Ask the President-Elect, never really took off. I've been tracking it on Flickr.
The current project is off to a much more dynamic start.
In terms of "bubbling up" the most popular or highest-quality questions, the Community Counts application does a number of things better than comparable tools (e.g. the three applications used on Change.gov to achieve a similar goal). For example, the diversity of views into the data it offers and the more careful default settings are nice.
The key question, in my view, will be wether or not they manage to consistently get enough of the top questions in front of and answered by the President in order for participants to find their activity worthwhile.
updated about 1 year ago, posted about 1 year ago
WhiteHouse.gov just launched its first round of Open for Questions (this has been tried before on Change.gov). The setup is pretty much the same as the last instance on Change.gov (Google Moderator, one main topic plus a few sub-categories, user input is sorted by popularity only). New is the fact that they're keeping it very short (the forum will close before Obama answers a few questions on Thursday).
Already, the numbers for participants, questions and votes are getting pretty big (again).
updated about 1 year ago, posted about 1 year ago