The Obama-Biden transition team is now “Open for Questions.” With 40 days still to go until his inauguration, President-elect Obama took action on two important campaign promises. The “Open for Questions” tool on www.change.gov, the newest tool on transition team’s site, promises to open up government with access to our leadership, and does so with new Google technology.
The Google Moderator tool, embedded in the site, allows anyone with a computer and internet access to pose a question to the President-elect and the transition team. The benefit of Google Moderator is the ability to vote on questions, allowing an interactive and engaging experience for site visitors and dynamic content based on collective input. In addition, Moderator improves the interaction between those answering the questions and those asking; instead of a large pile of questions, dominated by fringe or accusatory questions, Moderator brings the important and most-demanded questions right to the top.
Obama spoke of Google for Government during the campaign as part of his proposals to modernize Washington. This tool isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think “Google” (usually search, maybe even Gmail), but this is truly Google for Government. And this is the right way for Obama to use available modern technology to change the way we interact with our government.
Online video and YouTube changed politics, but everyone uses those now. In most major elections, every candidate posts videos online, and many use YouTube and other video sites in an interactive capacity to receive and answer questions. Using the Moderator tool is something new and unique. Obama and his team should use Google Moderator tool in conjunction with online videos to take the interaction to a new level.
The transition team should reach out to the people who posted the questions that ended up in the top 100 of the vote count and request a video question. Better yet, divide the questions into a few main categories to cover the important issues of our time, such as the environment, the economy, foreign policy, domestic policy, and health care, and then pick the top questions in each group and request the video question. Then, Obama, with input from his new advisers should respond via video.
Obama’s focus on interactive technology is the perfect demonstration of our need for a President who understands how we live our daily lives. During the campaign we often mentioned McCain’s technology incompetence. Not to portray McCain as generically old, but specifically out-of-touch with the way we get our information and how we want to interact with our government. Now we see the specific measures that would be missing from a McCain administration. For the future, I hope we learn from the opportunites we have now when selecting our future leaders.
Take Back the Flag 