Nearly two years ago, I helped pen a posting here, suggesting that politicians should embrace a new town hall format. The idea was that the Internet and user-ranked questions would help leverage a community's voice and provide real insight into the minds of constituents. Not only that, the Internet promised to grow the size of the town hall, putting more people "in the room" than ever before. This morning I watched the President's Internet Town Hall, comprised primarily of user-ranked questions, and I'm glad to see how far we've come. In fact, yesterday the General Services Administration announced agreements allowing the use of Flickr, YouTube, and Blip.tv by federal agencies, a large step in the right direction towrds meeting people where they're at on the Internet. However, these are only the first steps.

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.

Italian media consultant Antonella Napolitano summarizes her experience with 10domande, a project similar to our own 10Questions, an online-only debate in which voters uploaded video questions to the presidential candidates, and the public voted on their favorites (if you need a reminder of what 10Questions was all about, check out our summary of the project).

The internet offers a better way to involve the public in evaluating our presidential debates, and because we’ve wanted to improve upon attempts to incorporate it into that process, we launched 10Questions.com on Oct. 17, 2007. Now, two and a half months later, the public has had the chance to rate the candidates’ responses to the top ten submitted questions and we are declaring 10Questions an unmitigated success

Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel were able to get us their responses to the top ten videos on 10Questions right before this week’s deadline!

Now it’s your turn. Go to 10Questions.com and vote on whether the candidates have actually answered the questions. Voting runs until Dec. 31, after which we’ll announce the results.

Just in time before tonight's deadline, we've added Barack Obama's responses to the the top videos on 10Questions. We're glad his campaign took the time to participate in 10Questions, though Obama was unable to record his answers to the top questions. Instead, the campaign hunted down videos of his statements from speeches and the campaign trail.

Today, December 15, is the official deadline for candidates to post their answers to the 10Questions.com online presidential forum. But since we are hearing from several campaigns, including those of Sen. Barack Obama, Rep. Dennis Kucinich Gov. Bill Richardson, and Rep. Ron Paul that they are still hard at work on their answers, we've decided to extend the deadline by three days, to Tuesday, December 18.

Welcome, NY Times readers!

Today, the New York Times Editorial board reminded the candidates about the 10Questions project, and asked again for their participation:

So you're running for president? That's terrific. As you know, the New York Times Editorial Board is involved in a project along with the nonpartisan group techPresident to use the Internet to expand voter participation in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the last two months, citizens posted video questions aimed directly at all the candidates. Then they voted to select the best questions (see www.10questions.com). And now the candidates have begun posting their video answers. We hope those candidates who haven't responded can find time before Dec. 15 to take this opportunity to a) listen to citizens asking unmoderated questions and b) speak directly to those citizens. To join in, please visit techPresident.com or 10Questions.com.

We hope to receive John Edwards' answers soon.

The story behind the voting on Round One, with our explanation of how we checked for ballot-stuffing. And yes, some people did try to cheat, but it didn't affect the results.

We've posted the top ten questions for the candidates, and already, one of them, Mike Huckabee, has answered!