Digg-like tool lets Change.gov visitors pick policy questions
A new tool on President-elect Barack Obama's transition site works like Digg in that users can vote for the issues that matter most to them.
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team on Wednesday launched a tool on its transition site Change.gov that utilizes the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 tools to bring to attention issues that matter to voters.
Its "Open for Questions" tool allows visitors to submit a question for the transition team and, much like Digg, allows users to vote for other people's questions they find important or vote against questions they don't like. The most popular questions will be regularly answered by the Obama team.
As of Wednesday evening, 159,890 had voted on 1,986 questions from 3,255 people. The most popular question was, "What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?" The second most popular question was, "What will you do as President to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration and how will you ensure that our system of checks and balances is renewed?"
Obama's advisers had previously indicated that the president-elect would use such a collaborative approach to come up with solutions for problems like regulating the privacy terms for electronic health records.
"That's the kind of thing that shouldn't be decided by one person in the new administration," Obama adviser Reed Hundt said in October.