"Ask the President" Launches; Let the Public Pick Questions for Obama

Micah L. Sifry | March 19, 2009 - 12:07pm | 1 comment | Email This!

On the first full day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an executive memo calling on the government to become more transparent, participatory and collaborative. He wrote:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Of course, public participation is a two-way street. That's why, today, Personal Democracy Forum is proud to announce that we are partnering with a cross-partisan coalition of old and new media in launching "Ask the President," an open, collaborative, participatory forum where anyone can post a question and vote up their favorites. Our lead partners, The Nation magazine and The Washington Times, have committed to send a credentialed journalist to every presidential press conference armed with a list of the top citizen-driven questions, aiming to ask the President at least one generated by the public.

As Ari Melber, the lead spark plug behind this effort (along with Chuck Defeo at the Washington Times), writes in the Nation today:

The coalition is inviting people to write in questions or submit them as videos. Participants can see all the questions on the site and vote on the ones the president should answer. The system allows only one vote per question from each Internet IP address, but there is no limit on how many questions people can support. The portal also enables anyone to embed questions on other websites. So after posting a question about bank nationalization, for example, a participant can then link to that question on another site--a blog or news site--and appeal to others to back it.

The "Ask the President" forum is being hosted by CommunityCounts, the wonderful open-source community discussion platform built by David Colarusso. It's a direct outgrowth of the work we did during the primaries with 10Questions.com, and we're all thrilled to be working together now. Additional sponsors include Change.org, Care2, The Field, Jack and Jill Politics, HughHewitt.Com, Culture Kitchen, Democrats.com, Citizens for Civil Discourse, Smart Mobs, and Afro-Netizen, along with Craig Newmark and Lawrence Lessig.

Our readers also like:

Daily Digest: 5/11/07
128 recommended posts
Categories: 

Comments

Nice, but still destined to fail the more it succeeds

by utopus on March 20, 2009 - 12:48pm

I like what you're doing here - indeed, I initiated a couple of projects in Sunlight Labs, Ping the President and The People's Agenda just after Obama's inauguration with a similar aim - but I fear your Ask the President utility, like all similar ones before it, is destined to fail the more it succeeds.

If this catches on, pretty soon there will be thousands, maybe millions of questions, everyone duplicating each others' efforts with minor differences. Only the top-rated questions will get found on a regular basis, and so the good old ones will continue to climb in rating, even if better newer ones could replace them.

You've done a lot to try to address this - in particular by landing people at the Random tab, so everyone question gets an equal shot at first. Or does it? Reloading the Random tab, it seems like often the same questions just shuffle around - I don't get an entirely new set. But even this won't be enough.

Also, the whole "don't log in - just vote!" idea is tiresome and divisive. It's the kind of thing that's led us to our current politics dominated by snap judgements, wedge issues, and demonizing the opposition. And the thumbs up / thumbs down icons don't help - what is this, just another Roman circus?

Also I'm a little put off by the whole "15 minutes of fame" aspect of this: the payoff I guess, like during the primaries, it to be the American Idol who wins the contest and gets their YouTube displayed on TV for the President to answer. Is that really what we want to promote in a democracy? Sounds more like a celibritocracy to me...

Plus this seems developed in the usual "entrepreneurial" high tech way: in secret, among a small group of people, who go out and get some "angel" backers and then attempt to corner the market on this kind of thing before any potential competition has a chance to penetrate the market.

What are you guys in this for anyway: personal fame and wealth (I've noticed you've started soliciting for $60 memberships now...), or to give citizens at large a voice in their government?

And citizens at large - to me - are not a collection of American Idol winners...