Change.gov has released another ground-breaking feature.

This time, it’s “Open for Questions“, a digg-like feature for voting up questions for the administration-to-be.

Somewhat similar to the example set by the British mysociety.org, No. 10 Petitions, Open for Questions is part petition, part comment thread, and part internet press conference.  By allowing anyone to submit questions, and then allowing votes on the best questions to rise to the top, the transition team is experimenting with one answer to the question “What are you going to do with all of those comments?”

This is a real question, since the healthcare conversation, as of this writing, has racked up over 5,000 comments.  A reporter asked me today how one can possibly benefit from an overwhelming number of comments.  My answer was that it can be a challenge, especially as the response increases.  More important than initially designing a perfect system, though, is to experiment with what might work.  Expertise and knowledge are distributed throughout the country, and no matter how extensive the team’s outreach efforts, tapping into all of the ideas is impossible.

Tools like Open for Questions are at least one step toward solving that problem, of creating more meaningful interaction between citizens and government.

As Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry wrote on TechPresident this morning,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the lesson of the story is we collectively need much better tools for mass collaboration than we now have. How do we scale up relationships of trust and accountability? Are we bound by what our brains are capable of–face-to-face relationships with a few hundred peers at best? Or can we develop effective communications and reputation systems that would enable much larger groups to connect effectively?

While the answers won’t always be obvious, addressing them can only happen through measured experimentation.  We’re happy to see another step in that direction.

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To kick off our Policy Review blog series, I’d like to start with Steven Clift’s chapter from Rebooting America*, Sidewalks for Democracy Online.

While Clift’s essay presents a number of ideas about how technology should enhance our civic lives, I’d like to focus on the two ideas I see at the heart of his argument. First, that legitimate government is a function of the larger populace, and that that that citizenry finds an ideal expression in well organized communities. The second idea is that the values and mechanisms we recognize in real-world communities are most readily replicated through a familiar online tool — the email list.

The essay initially connects representative government with geography, suggesting that local policy consideration forms a foundation on which all government rests:

Representative democracy is based on geography, on people connecting with one another locally to react to and influence government. And yet, rarely does anything truly interactive happen online that enables citizens to jointly solve problems or to get directly involved in efforts to make their communities better. Democratic participation online is having the effect of disconnecting us from our physical place in the world, to our collective demise.

While I would place much more emphasis on the importance of reason in policy creation, choosing to emphasize discourse over a sense of place, Clifts emphasis on geography becomes clearer when he movingly explains the sort of discourse he’d like to cultivate:

When I was a child and my father had cancer, I remember neighbors coming to our assistance in our time of need. Today, with modern life keeping neighbors as strangers, we must use these new tools to break down barriers to community. You deserve the right to easily e-mail your immediate neighbors the morning after you’ve been burglarized without having to go door-to-door to collect e-mail addresses. We can balance safety and privacy with selective public disclosure of such personal contact information with an intelligent “unlisted to most” directory option that is not the all or nothing of today.

This is big “C” community and small “d” democracy. A collection of better-connected blocks, tied to broader neighborhood and community-wide online efforts will serve as the vibrant foundation we need for accountable and effective representative democracy right up to the Congress and president. You cannot force everyone to be neighborly, but the bonds of community can be restored and nurtured despite dual income families and the assault on time for community involvement.

Whether government is considered at its national level or at a municipal level, Clift’s vision — one of empathy, shared responsibility, and interconnectedness — gives us a better sense of the civic life he values.

While this might seem too sentimental to have any impact on executive branch tech policy, productive community and a shared stake in outcomes — the stuff of the communities Clift envisions — are the stuff of successful online organizing. Most of the successful email lists I’m on, many of which I describe here, are public and open, but also function through the same sense of trust and connection praised in small communities.

All of this is familiar to Clift, of course, who has been a longtime community email list organizer.

I am helping build an online neighborhood forum that will soon connect 10% of the households daily (in an area with 10,000 residents) where I live in Minneapolis. Every neighborhood should have an online space (see links to E-Democracy.Org’s Issues Forums and projects like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, and the academic i-Neighbors project from E-Democracy.Org/nf). We also need tools that allow people who live within a block of one another to connect many-to-many in secure, semi-public ways. This builds on the simple directory idea above and extends it to support all sorts of exchanges, from babysitting referrals to communicating as a group with city hall about potholes.

As the incoming Obama administration thinks about how to harness the enthusiasm generated by a campaign saturated with ideas about organizing community, they’d do well to listen to the advice of organizers like Steven Clift, who have thought long and hard about how to build civic communities online that are the best of both worlds, giving all the capabilities possible through digital technology without losing the intimate connection of a local email list.

While the policy consequences for transition organizers aren’t exactly clear, Clift has suggestions for the rest of us, including the following:

I have shared some big ideas that will help us make progress over the long term. But what can each one of us do now, today, to restore our democracy?
A. Join or create place-based forums or blogs for your neighborhood or community.
Recruit 100 people, require the use of real names, and open up your own local forum. Learn more at E-Democracy.Org/if. Be sure to give people a choice to participate by e-mail or online.
B. Work with your elected officials to introduce legislation requiring all public meetings to be announced on the Internet. Updating open meeting laws to first require announcements, then agendas, handouts, digital recording, is a good starting point. Learn more at DoWire.Org.
C. Tag the content you produce with geographic terms or “geo tag” if you are technically inclined.

Regardless of how online communities might change with a President who values them, we can be sure that the email list will remain at the center of that organizing world, given its low price, simplicity, and unversality.

*Rebooting America was prepared by the Personal Democracy Forum, which is headed by Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij, Senior Technology Consultants for the Sunlight Foundation.

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Our friends at Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) have launched an essay contest around the issue of Rebooting America: Democracy in the 21st Century, which is the name of an anthology of essays they are publishing on the topic. PdF will include the contest winner’s essays in the book that will include pieces written by leading thinkers and activists and citizens like you. They are publishing the book in conjunction with their Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York City. Contest winners will also receive complementary passes to the conference.

I’m honored to join the likes of Clay Shirky, Yockai Benkler, Susan Crawford, Beth Noveck, Craig Newmark, danah boyd, Scott Heiferman, Tara Hunt, Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Howard Rheingold, John Bonifaz, Brad Templeton, Mike Turk, James Rucker, Morra Aarons, Patrick Ruffini, Lisa Stone, Joe Trippi, David Weinberger and others in offering ideas on how to reinvent democracy in America using the Internet and Web 2.0. Here is what the folks at PdF are asking us all to respond to:

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

But PdF doesn’t just want experts to contribute to this project so they are asking their readers and the general public to submit their own ideas. Plus, they are also inviting people to read the various submissions and help decide which ones are worth including, by voting them up or down. It’s not a pure Digg model, Micah Sifry wrote me in an email, since PdF is going to make the final choices, but they are going to be paying close attention to that feedback loop.

Time is tight! Submissions are due May 1^st, and the book’s release date corresponds with the June 23-24 conference. The essays are not to be long, 800 to 1,500 words. You can get all the details here. Help us all reimagine democracy.

(Full Disclosure: Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej who run PdF are strategic consultants to Sunlight.)

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