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Change.gov Uses Google Moderator System
GMonkeyLouie writes "The website for President-elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov, has unveiled a section called Open for Questions, which lets users submit questions and vote them up or down, in an effort to let the collaborative mind produce the questions that are the most important to the American populace (or at least the web-savvy portion). The page is powered by Google Moderator. It was unveiled yesterday, and CNet reports that when they went to post last night, '159,890 had voted on 1,986 questions from 3,255 people.'"
1,986 questions from 3,255 people
Either a couple thousand people asked the exact same question or some questions are being "lost".
The website allows for greater transparency... or greater ability to bury unwanted/uncomfortable questions while seeming more transparent.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Blagojevich_questions_censored_on_Transition_site.html?showall
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.
The Blagojevich questions -- many of them polite and reasonable -- can be found only by searching words in them, like "Blagojevich," which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.
"Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will 'serious' campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?" asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California.
"This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate," reads the text underneath it.
Also removed as "inappropriate":
"In light of the recent corruption scandals (Blagojevich, Rangel, Jefferson, Stevens, etc) that have dominated the political scene,is there any ethics legislation being crafted to actually curb corruption and prevent another wave of nixonian cynicism?", a question from "lupercal," of Gainesville.
And: "Is Barack Obama aware of any communications in the last six weeks between Rod Blagojevich or anyone representing Rod Blagojevich and any of Obama's top aides?", a question from Phil from Pennsylvania.
Declaring a question "inappropriate" is different from merely voting it down; it's calling foul on a question, not just disapproving of it.
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.
link
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe I'll sign in so I can submit my question:
"Why does your government web site link to and use JavaScript hosted on a corporate site, googleapis.com?"
It's bad whether it's Haliburton OR Google.
It's interesting that you mention that. I think most people think the US wasn't founded with a direct democracy simply because it wasn't practically feasible. Now that it is (with technology), people think it'd be a far better system. They should take a Greek political history course or something.
This is the way government should be: good initiatives will be automatically 'dugg' up, and bad ones will be 'buried', according to the will of the people.
What could possibly go wrong?
I can understand the general feeling of negativity or at least pessimism regarding this, but I'd like to think that its a good step to see them continuing to embrace the web as a way to allow more people to reach them. Is it just a PR thing? Maybe. But with the questions being so 'out there' to everyone to see, I would think it allows people to call them out on more topics.
Sort of a 'Hey, on your own website people are asking questions about stem cell research. What is your answer? Don't pretend you don't see it's the number three question.'
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I'm not convinced a republic is any better. We sit starry-eyed at the fact that the hoi polloi don't get to bludgeon us with whatever bigotry is currently fashionable, but the republic system produces oligarchy very easily with the resulting party systems. Rising up in the party requires in-party connections and orthodoxy and without it you can't succeed. Like weeds, the big parties prevent smaller parties from emerging and gaining prominence in the media.
We do not live in a true democracy, so we can fault it as much as possible, while we live in a republic and tend to be more tolerant of its flaws. I say neither works. And, nothing works. I think we're screwed no matter what we do, and I don't recommend ANYTHING (or nothing)...
And they best be scared... look at what has already ranked pretty high... http://moderator.change.gov/?embed=http://change.gov/openforquestions#9/e=8&t=open+source
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
ahh ... so people keep asking these "bullshit" questions, yet ... the people don't care about these questions?
in some superior future, google moderator itself is our government
what i mean by that is, the citizens govern themselves via internet technology that groups, edits, and resolves the important issues and what to do about them, no representational system needed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They're smart enough to stay off the net. See examples: /b/, tubgirl, two girls one cup, pain olympics, etc etc. :)
But on a more serious note I'll mangle and paraphrase a Sherlock Holmes story. Watson tell Sherlock they've landed on the moon. Sherlock's response "Oh really? That's nice." When questioned about why he doesn't place more importance on this momentous event he replies "A man's mind is like an attic. If you fill it with everything you find you soon find that it's filled with clutter and you have no idea where anything is. I keep only information that is important to me and I know where everything in my attic is at all times."
The moral being just because someone has a narrow scope of knowledge does not in any way detract from them being brilliant.
Sadly, they'll see the public smackdown as just another example of a wide-spanning conspiracy. Some people cannot entertain the thought that they might be wrong, and therefore they cannot be taught anything. Sad, but true.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Turns out, censorship of idiots is far less effective than ignoring them. Tends to breed conspiracy theories.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I'm quite glad we live in a republic, where the stupid elect those who have demonstrated they at least have machiavellian intelligence. It's fortunate for all of us that one breed of intelligence usually includes others as well. -_-
Does it really? This report begs to differ. Elected officials are actually dumber than the general public, at least when it comes to civic literacy: Elected Officials Score Lower than the General Public In Civic Literacy Test
So, a governor is openly trying to pocket 7 figures in US $ in exchange for a senate seat (which legally pays, what, $200K/year) and questions regarding that are "stupid"? Wow.
Do you have ESP?
The structural mechanisms described were put in place for 2 reasons. First, because many viewed the federal government as a creation of the states (not from we the people). Second, it protects state sovereignty against federal encroachment. Thus the states could reign in a national government that some were afraid would be less representative of the people.
That's why the Bill of Rights does not, by a strict textual analysis, apply to the states. See Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore (a seminal John Marshall caase). At the time, no one suspected that the states would, in time, become the main oppressors of freedom.
But that's why Federalist 46 is interesting. Madison argues that the power of all governments, both state and national, originate from the people, and if in the future the people should choose to place their confidence in one or another, they should be empowered to do so.
So contrary to the popular "wisdom," the founding fathers were not as hostile to democracy as people like to claim. The Federalists (Adams) were afraid, but the Democrats (Jefferson) were all for it.
So I just modded about 150 questions at change.gov to get a sense of the questions and what I, personally, would do as a moderator.
I modded a few 'inappropriate' for asking questions that were posted on a board devoted to politics that demonstrated racial bias or some kind of juvenile focus on sex. I found myself modding down questions that:
(1)assumed facts not in evidence
(2)were thinly disguised debating points, rather than actual questions
(3)asked for a federal response to what was a state oriented question, and/or
(4)were unduly personal for a board designed to surface policy issues important to the country.
In the course of modding, I ran across a fair number of questions about Ill.'s govenor, so censorship is not happening. I found myself modding almost all of them down for one of the four reasons I listed above.
I think what you percieve as 'censorship' is actually the result of the majority of voters coming to conclusions similar to mine, and perhaps even for similar reasons. That the questions drop to the end of the list is not surprsing. Perhaps you will find the questions you are interested in if you start at the bottom of the list where all the unpopular questions reside.
Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
There you go, being all sensible. That'll never work...
What I find really bizarre is that people reject the ideas put forward by the people who were given the job of finding the answer completely, yet they believe crackpot theories with not one shred of proof.
Much like the moon landing thing I guess. Ok, the investigators got it wrong a few times, that's not good, but hell, its a very difficult question to answer.
I imagine we may never know the fully accurate reason why the towers fell, simply because the task of finding out may be too complex. Possibly there will be some plausible answers emerging over time as more people tackle the problem in a scientific fashion.
In the meantime conspiracy capitalists, you know, the guys who make a mint peddling misinformation and books for cashy money, will muddy the waters as much as they can to maintain their revenue stream.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Exactly. I was browsing the site and a bunch of questions about ending the Fed have high positive ratings, so in that respect PKDhead is incorrect. Didn't look into the truther thing because I don't care.
Seeing all of those repeat questions makes me wonder how effective this thing is going to be. It's not hard to search first for terms in a question you want to ask and see if someone else has covered it, but it doesn't look like folks are doing that. I wonder if the admins are going to take this into account when picking which questions to answer.
Your brain is not a computer.
knowing how to effectively use the technology is another.
All because you don't know how to use the technology doesn't mean you don't know how computers affect society (or whatever you're deciding on) - although you'd probably have to be a bit smarter than most.
I know a number of people who can make brilliant decisions on things which they have little specific knowledge of - it only when they have to micromanage they would completely fall on their faces (and so they don't micromanage)
Since we need some kind of reference to cars here, it would like saying that the-powers-that-be can't require that automakers produce cars that are more fuel efficient because the-powers-that-be are not automotive engineers and can't conceptualize that obtaining better mpg is a non-linear process etc.
But which ones should we listen to? I'm really interested in what both Noam Chomsky and William F Buckley have to say, and much less so to some random UC Berkeley hippy or right wing logger type.
I think the notion of a moderated, reputation based opinion pool is brilliant.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
The Federalist Papers were written by the Federalist faction, to persuade people to accept the Constitution and quell fears that it would create a tyrannical central authority. At the time, one of the debates was over whether there should be "prior amendments" to explicitly limit the new government's power. Author "Publius" (Madison & Co.) argued that a bill of rights would actually be harmful, because it would get misinterpreted to mean that freedom of speech &c. are the only limits on federal power. To avoid that problem, the Bill of Rights then included the 10th Amendment. Even so, Publius was correct in that point.
If you look at the documents by which the states ratified the Constitution, and the vote counts for them, you can see the suspicion that Americans had at the time against the Constitution. Several prominent Founders, including Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine, argued against the Constitution, and others such as William Randolph of Virginia saw it only as better than nothing, as "Union or no Union."
Madison & Co. argued in the Federalist Papers (around #41) that the Anti-Federalist faction was being paranoid for predicting that such clauses as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" would be perverted into general-purpose powers for the feds to do absolutely anything. As you note, the Bill of Rights was added specifically to make it clear that there are limits on federal power, and that the federal government would have no powers but those specifically granted to it. Several states in their ratifying documents echoed that statement and even added that they reserved the right to secede! Still, the idea that the Founders supported absolute democracy is not quite accurate, because of their decision to limit what the new government could do. If they had really trusted "the people" not to elect representatives who would violate their rights, then there would've been no need for any limits on government power. Eg. Jefferson: "It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Later, the 14th Amendment did impose some explicit restrictions on the states such as due process. But that only happened after several states tried to exercise their right of secession and the central government demonstrated that the union was no longer a voluntary one.
Revive the Constitution.