Change.gov Takes Questions: The Obama transition team might have an answer.

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: New York Times

....A new feature on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition Web site, Change.gov, which allows users to submit questions and then vote on the ones they most want answered, went live on Wednesday.

The tool, “Open for Questions,” already appears to be getting traffic. As of Wednesday afternoon, users sent in roughly 1,000 questions and logged more than 70,000 votes, and those numbers were climbing higher by the minute. The Obama transition team said that some of the most popular questions would be answered “on a regular basis.”

Leading the pack was this submission from Diana in New Jersey: “What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?” Other questions in the top 10, based on user rankings, focused on what incentives Mr. Obama would provide to encourage “greener behavior across the country,” what steps he would take “to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration,” and whether the president-elect plans to lift the federal ban on stem cell research during his first 100 days.

“Open for Questions,” is part of the Obama team’s effort to create an online platform that provides a measure of interactivity, though the format is not a new one. The Web site, CommunityCounts, in partnership with several other organizations, has also been collecting text and video questions for the president-elect that users can vote up or down.

Change.gov also includes a discussion board where citizens can post comments on topics posed by the transition team. (The current question is: How is the current economic crisis affecting you?) The site also features a new section that lists the groups meeting with the transition team.

Read more: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/changegov-takes-questions/

[bertman]

1. Can hardly wait to try this. I've sent at least five emails to the change.gov site and

each has generated the standard form email response: "thank you for your comments regarding blah blah blah."

So far I feel pretty good about even that since the outcry against John Brennan helped derail his nomination as CIA Director.

It feels good to have a President who wants citizen input.

[OhioChick]

4. Same here....

Wrote many times and probably got the same generic email in return that you did.

This new format should be interesting.

[davidswanson]

2. Here's an Idea

We would like to encourage you to vote in support of a particular question that has already been asked, so that it rises to the top of the list and stays there, this question:

"Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor - ideally Patrick Fitzgerald - to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?"
Bob Fertik, New York City

Here's how:

1. Sign in. Click to sign into the Change.gov website. It's just one easy step. You won't need to check your Email, and you'll be returned to the screen you were on.

2. Search. On the Open-for-Questions page type or paste into the search box these words: special prosecutor independently

3. Vote. That should bring up the right question which you can then vote for by clicking on the check mark.

Please do it now!

[bertman]

5. Done. Thanks for making that easy, David.

[jtrockville]

7. Did I miss it? (it seems to be closed now)

[ChazII]

8. Hope this helps --

This edition of Open for Questions comes to a close at 12:00 a.m.

Thursday, December 11, 2008 05:50pm EST / Posted by Dan McSwain
Since its launch yesterday, the Open for Questions tool has processed over 600,000 votes from more than 10,000 people on more than 7,300 questions. Voting will come to a close Friday, December 12th, at 12:00 a.m. EST, so that we can prepare answers to some of the most popular questions. (Note: All of the questions submitted so far will be archived here.)

Pilot projects like "Open for Questions" depend on feedback from users to better understand how to make participation intuitive and productive. In case you missed the link at the bottom of the Open for Questions page, we have a feedback form for any ideas or comments you have about the tool.

Participation in Open for Questions outpaced our expectations, and we're looking forward to rolling it out again next week. We're tremendously excited about the promise of tools like this that offer Americans a level of access that has historically been hard to come by. By voting questions up, users have been able to convey to our team which major issues -- like the auto industry, health care, ethical standards, and others -- are the most important to this community.



********
It looks like it will be back next week. I apologize for not knowing how to change fonts. The above paragraph comes from the Change.gov site.

[Triana]

9. You can't. That session of Open for Questions came to a close at 12:00 a.m.

You can no longer vote on the questions.

However, that question did seem to get a lot of votes before archiving.

[blueclown]

3. Will he and his team actually listen to our questions and comments?

Or is this just a facade?

[Name removed]

6. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. Total of 978,947 votes on 10,303 questions from 20,463 people.

So that averages to 2 questions per person, but almost a million votes on the questions.

Yeah, I'd say they will be busy with the tabulations.

The fun part for us will be trying to figure out if the most important questions got answered first.

[Posteritatis]

13. If this sticks around, I'm curious as to what the participation #s will look like

20,500 people is kind of low for something like this, but it's also just getting started. I wonder if a similar system will stick around post-transition.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Oh great...the most voted on question is .....

legalizing marijuana.

top o' the heap.

way ahead of torture and Constituion and etc.

I am so bummed now.x(

[Posteritatis]

12. A bunch of single-issue groups overwhelmed the questions this time around

If you look through a few hundred of the questions, you're a masochist, but you'll also notice a handful of suspiciously identical lines of questions. About a fifth of all of them are about marijuana, but there's big piles of very similar questions about child cancer (as though it's a single disease), light rail, and online gambling(!).

A good chunk of each have really similar wording and tend to be ridiculously loaded questions (which piss me off) and tend to involve the same arguments or buzzwords in them. It's obviously a number of groups DUing/Freeping/whatever the cause-equivalenting the thing. There's people saying "hey! Go here and ask this question in this tone, and we'll all vote for it! Also, we'll all post our own and you can vote for ours!"

It's kind of interesting trying to figure out which sets of questions are organized and which aren't. Even though the wording/popularity of a lot of the questions bother me, there's some really good ones a few entries back from the main echo chamber, and it's fascinating to see which groups and causes are jumping on this whole idea in the first place.

(I'm also still laughing at the right freaking out about "censorship" because one of their questions - something to the effect of "will you reveal your true criminal nature to the American people?" - got flagged as inappropriate.)