Ask the President... If He Lets You

We've come a long way from the YouTube debates. The primary season debates allowing regular shmoes like you, me, and snowmen to send in questions for the candidates via video -- while deserving of a quick golf clap -- are often scorned by proponents of open government for involving a middleman, CNN, which weasled its way into the process, controlling which questions were asked.

Those debates are now acknowledged as a start, a tiny crack in the glass wall separating real people from the politicos. But there are greater plans in place for using the Web to bring people's questions closer to the president.

Launched last week by open-source project communityCounts, and backed by a coalition including The Nation, The Washington Times, and Personal Democracy Forum, a new site called Ask the President hopes to help citizens get their questions to President Obama during press conferences.

Using GNU-based open-source technology, the communityCounts platform allows users to post questions on the site and/or submit links to content that exists elsewhere (e.g., YouTube). Site visitors can then vote questions up or down. While users can submit as many questions as they like, the system allows only one vote per question from each IP address.

Ask the President also deploys sharing features, such as the option to post your question to Twitter or Facebook; or to embed it in a blog, letting Web users vote directly from various sites.

Ideally, questions considered "most popular" (based on the net votes and the site's population) will be brought to a press conference by a "credentialed journalist" selected by the coalition. That journalist will then select one of the most popular questions to ask based on what is being, and has already been, covered at the conference.

But like all other well intentioned, third-party online initiatives, this process only works if the barriers to entry come down.

In this case, the greatest barrier would be President Obama, who has to agree to letting new voices into prime-time press conferences in the East Room and, further, per the site's wishlist, pledge to take one citizen question at each press confab. Such a pledge would fit in nicely with Obama's purported dedication to open government, but as yet it's unclear whether he or his communications minions would allow such tomfoolery.

Further, this process requires participation from a "critical mass," says David Colarusso, founder of communityCounts, rather than just a niche crowd of Web-goers. Since its launch last week, the site has registered 28,712 votes from 2,489 voters.

"Crowds are only wise under very specific circumstances," says Colarusso. "One of the things we try to be very conscious about is to try to get voices from the left, right, and in between... mostly because what it means is extremes can cancel each other out."

Regardless of how much success we achieve by harnessing Web 2.0 to bring citizens face-to-face (sort of) with their elected officials, however, there is still the glaringly hairy problem that this whole Government 2.0 movement leaves out the chunk of the country still disconnected. Rather than an inclusive process, then, it becomes yet another way to give a voice to those with the means to have it heard.

According to Colarusso, however, such a gripe has little merit.

"I always find this a really bizarre argument because when a politician goes to a town hall like Obama did last Thursday people don't get outraged that only so many people can fit into a town hall," he says. "If anything, this is a town hall that includes a great many more people."

? Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution