Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
1,986 questions from 3,255 people
Either a couple thousand people asked the exact same question or some questions are being "lost".
My name is Luke Skywalker and I approve this message. ADMIRAL ACKBAR!
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.
I understand our past presidents have been old... But really. Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
Giving the appearance of being interested in the ideas/concerns of the populace garners support. Even if they don't pay any attention to it, people will feel like they have a platform to communicate their ideas.
Overclockers
This story should have been tagged "Whatcouldpossiblygowrong". I mean, a moderation system that lets useful ideas float to the top and useless ideas to the bottom is based on the rather naive concept that the people voting are educated and unbiased. On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present, I'd like to add the following comment to this idea: buwhahahahahahahahahaha--!!!
People don't vote their conscience, they vote their prejudices. I thought that would have been clear by now.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Where did you see that? All I saw was a bunch of questions posted on a website that had been community moderated.
I certainly didn't see any answers or any indication that the President Elect himself would be reading these questions. In fact, the page itself offers no indication that either Obama or Biden will even see these questions - just that the transition team will.
Plus they've been censoring any question touching on a certain Illinois governor, so it would appear that they're NOT listening to what people actually want to know about, but rather only what they want to talk about.
In other words, politics as usual, but with a Web 2.0 coat of paint. Yay.
Too bad the censor all CHANGE.GOV suggestions related to a re-opened examination of the 9/11 Commission report
That's because 9/11 wasn't an inside job, and Obama's staff don't want to lower themselves to wading in the world of truther nutjobs.
Of course they don't:
Here. Also:
Now the cranks can see for themselves just how irrelevant they are.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Don't forget that they censored questions about Gov. Blagojevich.
Obama was of course caught lying about him ever meeting with Blagojevich.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hbJzaVo_Vcuv1HtB1U1eZDQOrQuQD94VL6S03
In that story Obama states that "I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening."
This story, which is only a month old and yet could only be found in the cache of yahoo says otherwise.
http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=Director+of+Illinois+Dept.+of+Veterans'+Affairs+visits+Quincy&fr=yscpb&u=www.khqa.com/news/story.aspx%3Fid%3D219212&w=director+direct+illinois+il+dept+department+veterans+veteran's+affairs+affair+visits+visit+visiting+quincy&d=Ph3CN0fiR5wF&icp=1&.intl=us
From November 8.
"Obama met with Governor Rod Blagojevich earlier this week to discuss it." (refering to the open Senate seat).
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I voted on a few questions just to see how it worked, I saw at least 10 Blagojevich questions out of the 50 I voted on. If the wingnuts are gonna spam stupid questions they should be deleted when there are real questions out there. There were also five or so birth certificate questions. The Republicans are probably not going to have good luck winning elections anytime soon unless they realize people don't care about this bullshit right now, we care about the war and the economy.
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
That story you linked to says that people logging in to the site flagged the questions as inappropriate. The questions are still visible on the site.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I believe that as part of the Presidential Transition Act of 2000 the incoming President is allowed access to the .gov TLD to set up a "transition" web portal. Calm down.
Do you know why they removed the story? Because the claim was renounced yesterday by KHQA. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Yeah, Barack Obama using "Change.gov" for the name of the website of his Presidential Transition makes him worse than the Nazis.
Whatever.
The myth of Haliburton's "sweetheart" deals is that they are a logistics company that has had government contracts for some time and under various presidents. Let's see if you're equally as hard on the Obama when he starts hiring his buddies. Wait, he already has. Frankly I'm more disturbed that "change" means hiring old Democrat stallworts than I am Haliburton getting a contract.
I suppose if you didn't frame your question in the form of an accusation it might stick.
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
Both the Senate and House Democratic and Republican caucuses have .gov domains, and they are frankly partisan. There's nothing strange about it in the general case.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So the President Elect in the short time he has to assemble a staff and plan for transition (among the many things he has to do) must instead get someone to develop and test his own custom Javascript on his own site. Or he can just use off-the-shelf components by one of the larger companies out there that is in the industry--components that many other people use.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
"On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present"
this instantly tells me you are extremely biased. as for "educated", unless you are talking about the hard sciences, this word means "indoctrinated into the clique"
everyone is biased. the intelligent person is always on the guard for the bias they have, and admit and accept they have some unidentified bias. in such a way, they form opinions that are about as unbiased as possible, by constantly being on guard against it
meanwhile, someone who is convinced they are magically incapabable of bias, for whatever idiotic reason, is leading forth with their biases on full display for everyone, utterly blind to how biased they are
that's you
the problem with saying that everyone is prejudiced and this is a bad thing is that it requires some sort of magical, omnipotent adjudicator of bias and prejudice somewhere. no such person or magical machine exists. as such, yes, we are prejudiced and baised in small and large ways, and this is just the way it is, and the way it will always be, and no one can ever do anything about that, so you just accept it as a fact of life, and it is not a problem to fix, but simply a fact of life to get used to
and, here's the real powe rof democracy: everyone's biases and prejudices balance out
meawhile, this sort of aristocratic opinion that there is an "us" few who are unbiased and fit for rule and a "them" who are hopelessly prejudiced and unfit for democracy is about as UNDEMOCRATIC and fascist an attitude as possible
you should try living in some place like china, where they know the common man is unfit, and only a speicla class of technocrats is fit for rule
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know you're not really a truther because you spelled "they're" correctly.
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.
Yeah, so, the fact that Obama met with Blagojevich right around the election definitely means that he knows all about and is likely involved in the governor trying to sell the seat over the past few weeks. That's definitely the logical conclusion.
Don't be dense just because it helps your agenda. Obama wasn't trying to claim that he's never spoken to Blagojevich. He's claiming that neither he nor his team was involved in or had any knowledge of the crimes that Blagojevich is now accused of.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Why?
Why shouldn't the government use tools that work?
They government also uses tools that are build by, among others, IBM, Dell, and Apple. Their buildings use wires and pipes made by companies. The paper is made by companies. The clothes they make are made by companies.
What do you expect, the government to make /everything/ they use in-house?
I'm not sure you understand what you're trying to imply.
What's wrong with asking to reform the debt-based economy? The US stopped using the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971 just because it abused it and it was not possible to continue using it without devaluating dolar's value, not because it was a bad idea. Since then, the government and the FED has clearly abused of the system and created too many problems. Trying to fix it doesn't seem stupid to me.
The US may not want to fix it because it'd mean admitting that the dollar is way too overvalued. But there's no reason why countries that can get their goods by exchanging them for other goods instead loaning them should agree with the US.
Kind-of off-topic, but I'm really stunned at how this shows that people just don't understand our government. I'm seeing so many questions that assume that the president has control over state and local government issues, should be doing things that should be handled by local governments, or assume that the president has legislative or judicial powers. Seriously.
I was able to sign in with a Canadian postal code instead of a US Zip code. Finally, we non-USians can have our issues with the American government heard.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
who's "they"? People going to the website? Or are you inferring that it's "Evil Partisan Operations Engineers" working for Change.gov?
You can pick your nodes, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nodes
People always need a conspiracy, it makes life more interesting. Sadly these people have much more faith in our government (and human nature) than I do.
NIST has changed its story on how WTC 7 fell 3 times now.
Thats how things work. You have a hypothesis, new data comes about, you change your hypothesis. Your on /., you should know this. The collapse of a building is a hugely complicated thing, with massive amounts of force and interactions, expecting any group of investigators to come up with one "story" is absurd.
Actually the process of diagnosing any failure is like this. When you have a cataclysmic software bug do you settle on your first explanation, or do you make a quick hypothesis, check it, reject it, then come up with another as facts dictate?
My problem with the "Truth" movement is I fail to see motive, nor how a government as incompetent as ours could pull of a huge conspiracy, and maintain full secrecy at all levels, with no leaks or whistle blowers. 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.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
"Of course their proof was done only as a computer simulation...."
Rather than, say, setting fire to a real 40-story skyscraper? Wow, those scientists and engineers sure are underachievers.
Also, it takes a considerable amount of scientific illiteracy to look at new experimental findings and declare that scientists are "changing their story." Truly, 9/11 truthers are the creationists of the 21st century.
Technically, creationists are the creationists of the 21st century, and that's sad.
But truthers are cut from the same cloth. Ignore facts and evidence that don't support your hypothesis, and hyper-scrutinize those that seem to. They've already decided what to believe, and the evidence must either support that, or be made to support that.
In other words, "You're doing it wrong!"
From your own link KHQA said that they were reporting on a planned meeting, yet the story refers to the meeting in the past tense.
Essentially you are relying on trusting that KHQA changed their story on facts and not because it has become inconvenient for the President-elect. The timing is more than suspect.
Just as the timing on Blag's arrest was more than suspect. It came a day after he spoke out against Bank of America and said they would not do business with them until they restored a credit line to a company that needed it to pay for their employees. They had been watching Blag for well over a month. Judicial Watch has been looking into him since 2006. I highly doubt that this was the first time they had evidence of corruption.
Don't worry, you didn't burst my bubble. It just proves that it is more than likely that KHQA has no guts. Either way, Obama and Blag have plenty of connections to each other. Obama served as an advisor to him. Both are well connected to scumbag Tony Rezko. It is hard to believe that a sitting Senator and Governor of the same state and party wouldn't know each other fairly well.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
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.
I think the problem is that much of what passes for normal in politics falls under what we call Troll or Flamebait.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What do you expect, the government to make /everything/ they use in-house?
Why do you misinterpret, misunderstand, and not answer the question? "Why does your government web site link to and use JavaScript hosted on a corporate site, googleapis.com?"
Why aren't FBI files hosted on google docs?
Why isn't gmail used for government business?
It may be a minor matter that for instance google can correlate your IP address with your use of or posts on change.gov, but so is downloading the MIT-licensed source for the javascript and hosting it locally so there are no dependencies on other commercial sites.
I'm not sure you understand what you're trying to imply.
I'm not sure you understand what that sentence even means.
There was a lot of debris and the hole was large. The truthers tend to show pictures that omit a large part of the debris, obscure the hole with smoke, show the field after cleanup had commenced, show awkward angles, etc. If you google around for actual pictures and testimony, you will see that there is a lot of debris strewn about, a lot of it was stuck inside the pentagon, and the hole was actually fairly large.
Like I said, truthers selectively seek evidence that seems to support their hypothesis and ignore that which does not.
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view.
Generally true, but not universal. Even when we were ramping up for invading Iraq, there were dissenters, and generally critical individuals and groups. I actually won $50 from a classmate, since I bet that there were no WMDs. Its an single self-serving example, but thats all we need to show that critical thought is possible.
If it isn't a secret, and true, then it would have been exposed long ago. And even with the groupthink of the time, it would have exploded sometime in the last 3 years, with our confidence and agreement with the government at an all time low.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
The difference here is that these events, we perpetrated by dehumanizing the victims, the perpetrators of these actions saw their victims as less than human, as aliens. They weren't killing people, they were killing "vermin". This process wouldn't be possible with 9/11, since we would have been killing people who we accord humanity to.
I'm not saying that there is no chance of there being a conspiracy, but that there isn't enough evidence to prove that there was one. I generally don't believe in anything that doesn't have proof. Right now the burden of proof is on the "Truth" crowd (a rather heavy one at that), and they have failed to meet it. Bring me the smoking gun, and I will happily believe and be convinced.
The conspiracy crowd, though, keeps having their points disproven, then they change their standard. They operate as if it MUST be true, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the fact it happened. This discredits it.
To me one of the biggest things invalidating the hypothesis of the "Truth" movement is that WE SAW IT COMING. We knew (or at least some people smarter than those our administration listens to) that there was a plot, we knew it involved planes, we knew who planned it, etc... The coincidence is too much for me, that an alien organization was plotting to do the exact same thing as the US government was plotting to do to itself, at the exact same times, with the same MO, etc...
Yes, we can disregard US intelligence to this ends for the sake of paranoia, but we also have foreign intelligence. To accept that the US controls all intelligence is a leap that I can't take without a HUGE burden of proof.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey