Daschle's Health Care Response Video: Interesting, Or Not?

Matthew Burton | December 2, 2008 - 4:56pm | 54 comments | Email This!

A week ago, the Obama-Biden transition team solicited ideas for improving health care. Today, the team responded to our comments with a video from Tom Daschle (recently nominated for Secretary of Health & Human Services) and Lauren Aronson.

(Comment preemption: Yes, Tom Daschle's glasses are funny.)

Here's the gist of what they said:

  • They got 3500 comments.
  • One person recommended we focus on preventive care
  • Another proposed a "Health Corps," akin to the Peace Corps. They say they will look into it.
  • Others mentioned cost control and insuring employees.
  • Daschle says they have already begun implementing some of the ideas, but he does not say which ones or whether those implementations were the direct result of this solicitation.

Is this video something that we tech-politics geeks should be excited about? I'm cautiously optimistic. The optimism is due only to the fact that the team is demonstrating Web literacy. I'm cautious because of the PR nature of the message, which is essentially a "Thank you for your ideas" in video format.

For a transition that officially began three weeks ago, it's fine work. We've been very eager to scorn Change.gov as failing to live up to our hopes, as if we expected interactive miracles to start happening on November 5. It is early yet.

Truth be told, there is nothing gutsy or innovative about this video. But if past administrations are our metric, then this team is doing well. Communiques like this one are a good start to a strategy that will probably get more and more risky in very small increments. When it comes to how the White House uses the Web, our community's expectations are higher than that of the general public. So we may have to wait a few months before Change.gov (or WhiteHouse.gov) impresses us.

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Comments

Baby Steps

by Josh Koenig on December 3, 2008 - 2:00pm
This is interesting, and it's nice that they put together this video in response to the flood of comments. It's also nice to see there's a lot of dialogue (back and forth) in the comments, and that it's mostly civil. On the other hand, this was also pretty scripted and staged. It's a performance-response. That's not unexpected, but the real hope is that we begin to find ways of moving beyond prepared remarks and into an actual dialogue w/the new administration. That's likely not possible as long as the power dynamic of the conversation remains what it is (commenting 1000s vs a video that cherry-picks), but as a first step this is pretty cool, especially if they really are open to the ideas being generated by commenters.

This is history in the making

by Christoph Schwe... on December 2, 2008 - 5:42pm
... but it also feels like it is in the making. Which is fine. However, I would like to point out that exclusively choosing two comments from the very first of 58 comment pages does not give great credibility to the claim that they read most of the 3,500 comments. I also would have loved a link back to all comments on the new page (maybe I overlooked it)... I think it is important to discuss the rating system used, since as everywhere on the Net, visibility is important. The ranking system favored user kllmt's comment, which was on top since almost the beginning. I do not say that his/her comment was not valid, it only got disproportional attention and therefore more positive ratings. On the same level, the next comment still got a rating of +38, but you would have read to the end of the page and move on to get there - so I suspect that this +38 comes from far less people than the +82 of the first comment. One idea to get around this would be to make the ratings only a weight in a randomized process rather than having deterministic ranking of the comments. However, I think it is great that they try this.

Attention bias

by tbonnemann on December 2, 2008 - 9:56pm
Christoph, I noticed a similar effect recently on two other sites (both driven by UserVoice): ObamaCTO (http://ideas.obamacto.org/) and Rebuild the Party (http://ideas.rebuildtheparty.com/). Instead of truly bubbling up the best ideas, the system heavily favored those ideas that had been submitted early and had gained an initial lead in votes. Basically, the first 25 choices above the fold received all of the attention and hence only solidified their top position over time (for some number crunching, see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3028432142/). While this may look like a perfectly negligible flaw for some use cases (e.g. user feedback management on UserVoice, threaded discussions on IntenseDebate), it poses a serious problem when used in large-scale, government-sponsored e-participation projects that have much lower tolerance for such favoritisms. To solve this, the system should be exposing "top rated" content much more cautiously (relative to other views: it definitely shouldn't be the only or default view). Another way is to enforce a certain attention balance across all items (e.g. by requiring participants to review a number of low-attention items per every vote or comment on an item that is already popular). Having said that, it's great to see Change.gov experiment so early and so openly. -- Web: htp://www.plansphere.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/planspark

The time it takes to read 3,700 comments...

by tbonnemann on December 2, 2008 - 10:49pm
It's feasible that all comments combined total somewhere around 430,000 words. That might take an average reader about 29 hours of uninterrupted reading (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3060802471/). Just reading, not processing in any form... -- Web: htp://www.plansphere.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/planspark

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by greatway on April 14, 2009 - 3:19am

Good post.The optimism is due only to the fact that the team is demonstrating Web literacy. I'm cautious because of the PR nature of the message.Nice sharing.Travel to Russia

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by fc_bar on April 16, 2009 - 8:40am

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by famaliar on April 18, 2009 - 8:10am

I appreciate the coordination between them.Is this video something that we tech-politics geeks should be excited about? I'm cautiously optimistic. The optimism is due only to the fact that the team is demonstrating Web literacy.The people will satisfy by them.
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by tolo87 on April 20, 2009 - 4:34am

I would really say that I think that this video was kinda cool. It shows something when video got 3500 comments. Am I right?

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by romankates on April 21, 2009 - 2:12am

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Good post for sharing in my Resume writings.It is said that they have already begun implementing some of the ideas, but he does not say which ones or whether those implementations were the direct result of this solicitation.

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