Day after day as we slog through the millions of details it takes to bring an idea from vaporware to full blown application version 1.0, a bright light pierces the cloud cover. Several days ago the transition team website change.gov opened up a series of public forums to gain popular opinions and ideas about the Obama Agenda Items. Hmmm. Wonder where that idea came from? In any case they covered all the content generated by the forums under the Fair use statutes of the Creative Commons accord. This means it can be lifted and posted on other sites.
Obviously there was a rush to comment from those who are following the transition activities. Naturally the infrastructure of change.com is not scalable enough to take the load of such significant traffic. This provides us with an opportunity to promote our proposal by cherry-picking the most noteworthy suggestions and posting them here on our “Suggested ideas” section. The important thing is for this important conceptual work not to get buried in the crush of commentary and for it to be isolated so as to allow further comment and collaboration.
In this way the work of the OAC can begin in earnest here and now. We invite your comments and improvements on the items posted in the top 20. All will be forwarded on a weekly basis to the Transition Team directly.
Redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing, this is a copy of a reply sent via intensedebate.
One possibility for evolving the current system is to develop a rating system for every comment, to objectify the process to a certain degree. Perhaps two Likert scales could be employed, ‘Credibility’ and ‘Uniqueness’. Every comment could be rated on a scale of sincerity, seriousness, depth of thought etc. on a scale of 1-5, as well as a scale that would reflect redundancy in ideas, opinions, hopes, goals etc. (on a scale of A-E ?).
Obviously, your A-1 comments could replace your current ‘top twenty’. However, one of the additional benefits of such a system would be the generation of 25 data fields (A-1 through E-5) that when linked to demographics could provide a basis for some Exploratory Data Analysis that could yield some undiscovered patterns, etc.
In addition, such a system might prove to be a means to identify particularly useful individuals (hint, hint). I would be curious as to my cumulative rating under such a system. That is assuming that you have the capacity to pull up all of my comments from the various agenda topics…
Let me know how I can Help,
Da Blob
By: John W. Robinson on December 4, 2008
at 8:24 pm
DaBlob,
I would add to what Harry says below the following: free voting (which is what the “thumbs up” recommends in effect are) is not elitism; in fact, to the extent that elitism and democracy are opposites, it is precisely not elitism. An elitist system would be one in which some (team of) “experts” was assigned to moderate the forum and pick out the “best” suggestions (or authors) for preferred status.
That said, I definitely think the present system needs to be refined; the organization of DailyKos (NOT, the liberal orientation of its content) could perhaps be taken as a model (note that their “rescue” system provides a small modicum of “elitism” in the sense canvassed above). Their are also a myriad of other forum systems in the webosphere, of course. Something like stickies and an faq would certainly be welcome.
As Harry notes, it would be useful to have a topical organization in addition to that provided by provider ratings. I would go further ( into deeper waters) by arguing that there should be some mechanism for rating ideas as well as speakers. The big problem here is coming up with an adequate system for describing ideas; that’s why we often resort to identifying them as “so-and-so’s idea”, with an implicit pointer to some utterances or text in which so-and-so expressed them.
Given the above, I would envision an overall architecture that organizes the discussion into fora addressing the main initiatives of the administration (foreign policy, health care, economics, etc.), perhaps with some facility for proposing new fora; within each forum a rating system for ideas, consisting of user recommendations; an overall contributor rating system, as well as a method of subscribing to the blog/diary of a contributor. This would put the onus, of pushing good ideas and thinkers to the top, on the community. The administration observers could confine their attention and response (in the first instance, at least) to these products of community consensus.
By: From Change.gov on a statement by Harry Webber ( sorry, we don't have the author) on December 4, 2008
at 10:49 pm
Harry, thank you for creating this place to capture and evolve ideas! While I was
slogging through all the contributions on the change.gov health care comment page,
and now, starting on the economy comment page, I was hoping that the Obama team
would do exactly what your proposing with your excellent start. Again, thanks.
By: Robert Lent on December 5, 2008
at 9:44 pm