Change (.gov/.org) Open for (Questions/Ideas)

Using Digg-style voting systems for organizing purposes is all the rage lately. The Obama Transition Team got in the game this week with the launch of Open for Questions, a Google-powered, Digg-lite service that lets supporters put forth their queries to the incoming administration in a forum where all users at Change.gov can rate them. Top-voted questions - supposedly - will be answered by the Obama team, though how and when that will happen is unclear. Needless to say, reviews so far are mixed.

At Tech President, Nancy Scola says "meh," noting that the system isn't all that well organized and will not likely scale. In the comments, Marc Laitin agrees that the service has a lot of problems - notably that questions are mostly unlinkable and therefore difficult to organize around, stymying any sort of grassroots multiplier effect from within the community - but he views the attempt itself is revolutionary and thinks it bodes well for the future.

At the Politico, Ben Smith notes that Obama supporters aren't having any difficulty organizing rapid response on the system. Since the service opened they have been actively voting down any question relating to the Blagojevich scandal. Smith's piece raises concerns as to whether Open Questions represents a real attempt at transparency, or will be a de facto fig leaf the transition team can hide behind while ignoring uncomfortable questions.

At Pushback, Jesse Singal has what I think is the appropriate answer to Smith. Jesse thinks that biased, community-moderation is just part of the game, and Smith's desire for "uncensored" or "unbiased" community voting are unreasonable and uncharacteristic of any social media community.

For myself, I'm with Nancy. This is kind of "meh." I agree that the idea is great, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. There's no good way to organize these questions (browsing and voting by topics would be nice) and there aren't even comment sections to allow users to discuss the merits of each question. The entire set up seems designed to discourage community formation and organizing, leaving participants isolated and atomized. The answering and accountability process - meaning how the Transition Team will answer high rated questions - is also unclear. Will they wait a month and then answer the top ten, or will they take the time to answer the top ten rated questions every day? Will answers be archived somewhere so they are easily found and referenced? Who knows . . .

I believe that the transition team had a great idea here, and are operating in good faith, but implementation problems at this point leave me worried that that the whole thing will be little more than window dressing.

By contrast, the new Ideas Contest sponsored by Change.org offers a much better model for how Digg-style social media filter to bring citizens into the governing/policy process. The rules of the contest are simple:

Here's how the competition works: anyone can go to www.change.org/ideas and submit a policy idea, discuss with others, and vote on the best ideas from around the country. On Inauguration Day we're going to host an event in Washington, DC and hand-deliver the top 10 rated ideas to a representative of the Obama Administration. We'll then launch a national lobbying campaign with the support of our nonprofit partners to ensure that each winning idea gets the full consideration of the Obama administration and the 111th Congress.

Ideas can be sorted into 29 different issue areas. All ideas are independently linkable and Change.org provides widgets for embedding your idea on your blog or on a variety of social networks, allowing participants to rally support around their idea (you can view a widget linking to my Idea in the sidebar). All questions contain a comment section to allow discussion around the proposed idea, and there are clear rules/guidelines so participants know what they can reasonably expect in exchange for their participation.

I take it on good faith that the Obama Transition Team had the very best intentions with the launch of Open for Questions - and I think Smith's comments of censorship are way off base. Nevertheless, I think Change.gov could learn a lot from Change.org when it comes to integrating this kind of voting system into their work.