Change.gov's "Open for Questions" feature is really good/addictive.

[Renew Deal]

I was tipped off to a new feature on the transition website. It's called "Open for Questions." It allows people to ask questions of the transition and rate other people's questions. I have to say, it's quite addictive.

http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions

[OhioChick]

1. I've written on several occasions with questions

And get a generic "thanks for writing" response. :shrug:

[Pirate Smile]

2. This is new. You can write a question, you and everyone else gets to essentially vote on

all the questions and then the top ones get answered.

This is new.

edit to add:

Change.gov Takes Questions
By Michael Falcone
You’ve got questions?

The Obama transition team might have an answer.

A new feature on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition Web site, Change.gov, which allows users to submit questions and then vote on the ones they most want answered, went live on Wednesday.

The tool, “Open for Questions,” already appears to be getting traffic. As of Wednesday afternoon, users sent in roughly 1,000 questions and logged more than 70,000 votes, and those numbers were climbing higher by the minute. The Obama transition team said that some of the most popular questions would be answered “on a regular basis.”

Leading the pack was this submission from Diana in New Jersey: “What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?”

Other questions in the top 10, based on user rankings, focused on what incentives Mr. Obama would provide to encourage “greener behavior across the country,” what steps he would take “to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration,” and whether the president-elect plans to lift the federal ban on stem cell research during his first 100 days.

“Open for Questions,” is part of the Obama team’s effort to create an online platform that provides a measure of interactivity, though the format is not a new one. The Web site, CommunityCounts, in partnership with several other organizations, has also been collecting text and video questions for the president-elect that users can vote up or down.

Change.gov also includes a discussion board where citizens can post comments on topics posed by the transition team. (The current question is: How is the current economic crisis affecting you?) The site also features a new section that lists the groups meeting with the transition team.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/changegov-takes-questions/

[OhioChick]

5. Thanks to you and Bleachers7 for bringing this to my attention....

It sounds like a good idea and I'll give it a try.

[Renew Deal]

6. This question is hilarious

"What part of the Communist Manifesto don't you agree with, and are you aware of the new epidemic of boating accidents?"
Karl, Stalingrad View response Post a response

[Renew Deal]

13. And a chemtrails question...

"Will you immediately stop the illegal geo-engineering/military program known globally as CHEMTRAILS to end the disastrous health effects of the program?"

:tinfoilhat:

[Renew Deal]

3. Did you do it with this feature?

If not, you should. The better questions float to the top. Besides, the inappropriate questions are hilarious.

[Pirate Smile]

4. Did you see Ben Smith of Politico bitching about "censorship" because people were

voting down the Blago, Birth Cert. type questions? He called it censorship and wants the Obama people to stop people from voting down questions on Blago. What a tool. People are voting up policy questions. The nerve! They must be stopped.

[Renew Deal]

8. That feature has nothing to do with politics.

It's supposed to be about policy. I'd think Smith was smart enough to realize that.

[Pirate Smile]

10. He got nailed for being an idiot so he has another post up on it.

1st post:

Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site

President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama's website.

-snip-
Community reporting systems like this are often vulnerable to abuse from committed partisans -- YouTube has wrestled with a parallel problem -- and the only solution is conscious efforts to remedy it.

So far, Obama's team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Blagojevich_questions_censored_on_Transition_site.html?showall

Asking questions, and flagging them

A couple of analysts whose opinions I respect, including John Cole, criticized my item yesterday on what I see as an abuse of the "flagging" function on Obama's "Open for Questions" site.

I wrote about the ability of some readers to take a highly-rated, not obviously inappropriate questions -- like the one above, which you can see got lots of votes within the system -- and "flag" the item as "inappropriate." The system appears automatically to remove those questions from the main page, and leave them accessible only by keyword searches.

Cole totally misunderstands my argument, and seems to think I'm objecting to some items being voted down.

"Obama supporters are not 'censoring,' they are voting. Jesus, the stupid," he writs. "Smith really doesn’t understand or care about the spirit of the effort here to get questions about issues that concern people."

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Asking_questions_and_flagging_them.html?showall

[Renew Deal]

11. I hope people also realize that asking a question doesn't mean advancing a viewpoint.

There have been a couple questions worded with a democratic/republican slant that are actually very good questions.

[mdmc]

7. kick LLOOKK

for a later look

[glowing]

9. It needs to be more interactive. It needs a better navigating feature.

I'm sure they have some techies working on this.. but half of all these questions could lead to a nice discussion amongst ourselves.. with ideas and suggestions.. that they could read from all of us who think we know it all anyway... I'm hoping this is the just the beginning of the blog feature and the format is developed better.

A better format would help with the questions.. many are repetitive. or very similarly focused.

[glowing]

12. 11,000 people subscribed.. with direct e-mails..

looks like he's circumventing the "liberal media" and going directly to the people.. Notice the people ask mostly policy questions. The media better get with the program or they will be obsolete.

[Azlady]

14. Thanks! Heading over there now n/t

[Pirate Smile]

15. kick