techPresident – techPresident Launches 10Questions.com

techPresident Launches 10Questions.com
By the editors, 10/17/2007 - 6:14am

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Dear techPresident readers and friends:

We're excited to announce the launch of 10Questions.com, a new kind of online presidential forum, one that aims to make the most of what the internet has to offer to politics.

On 10Questions.com anyone will be able to directly pose video questions to the candidates for President and choose which ones they most want answered. Candidates will be able to answer in detail and without the time limits imposed by traditional televised or on-stage debates. And citizens in turn will be able to give the candidates feedback on whether they actually answer those questions.

We're even more excited to be doing this in cooperation with the New York Times Editorial Board, in association with MSNBC.com, and with an amazing array of more than 40 co-sponsors. (Click here to see the whole list.)

Why a new online presidential forum, on top of all the others this year? Well, we believe the internet offers our democracy the chance to end the era of soundbite TV politics and start the era of community conversation. Old fashioned televised debates have their value, but TV has several inherent limits. Only a few people get to ask questions. The candidates have very little time to answer, forcing them to speak in canned sound bites. The audience has no way of providing meaningful feedback. If the candidate doesn’t answer the questions, we have no way of pushing them to do so.

10Questions will turn all that on its head.

Starting today, the sponsors of 10Questions are asking their millions of readers and the larger public to submit online video questions addressed to the candidates using a variety of platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, andBlip.tv), tagging their video with the word “10Questions.” The 10Questions site will then find and display those questions and enable the public to vote up or down on these submissions. At the end of four weeks, on November 14, we'll stop the voting and after a quick audit to check against ballot-stuffing, the top ten vote-getting questions will be submitted to all the major candidates.

The candidates will then have four weeks, from November 17 to December 15, to submit answers to be posted online. As those responses are posted, the public will be given the opportunity to vote again, up or down, on whether the candidates have answered the questions to their satisfaction. Users can vote on as many videos as they like, but they only get one vote per IP address. The process will end December 31.

Is this going to work? Well, call us congenital optimists, but we think 10Questions will demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd. The co-sponsors of 10Questions.com are a cross-partisan array of e-activist groups with giant mailing lists, new media sites with big readerships, and online community hubs and blogs where millions of people participate everyday in political conversation. It’s their involvement in posting and filtering questions to the candidates and the candidates’ responses that will make 10Questions the first truly people-powered online presidential forum in history.

To find out more about how this will all work, and how it all came together, check out the 10Questions About and FAQ pages.

Now it's your turn. Post a video question. Vote on the questions. Watch the candidates answer. Rate their answers. Change the debate. Who knows--maybe we'll improve the way we pick our candidates and even change the course of the election!

Andrew Rasiej, Micah L. Sifry, and David Colarusso, Co-Creators, 10Questions.com

This will work great (for the NYT and MSNBC)

Just as long as your goal is for the candidates not to be asked tough questions, this format will work great. Which is probably what the major sponsors want. The last thing the NYT and MSNBC want would be for the candidates to be asked really tough questions. And, that's definitely the last thing the Democratic and Republican parties want.

As TP knows, I outlined a different approach, and I've even started implementing that (example: http://nomoreblather.com/yt2/uninspected-cargo-containers ).

My approach would weed out the Obama Girls and snowmen; the TP/NYT/MSNBC approach will guarantee those type of questions will be right at the top. Which is probably exactly what NYT and MSNBC want.

By LonewackoDotCom at Wed, 10/17/2007 - 12:26pm | login or register to post comments

Human nature

You seems to assume the worst about people, Wacko. It's obviously very early to tell, but the most showy videos so far have been voted to the bottom of the pile.

I have to believe that humans (which many Americans are) really want the best for each other - however they see it. Otherwise, why would you want them to vote at all?

(I'm not just saying this b/c my video is on the top of the pile right now. I consider that an accident of timing and don't expect it to last long.)

By Ruby Sinreich at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 9:51am | login or register to post comments

There's another way. It might be a better way.

I see that 10questions is essentially a reworking of CommunityCounts, which is a great idea overall. In particular, I think the the idea of soliciting candidate responses to the selected questions and then having another round of voting on their responses is outstanding.

Nevertheless, what's going on here repeats some of the most glaring shortcomings of CommunityCounts. I think there's lots of room for improvement.

Frankly, the failure to randomize the display of videos on load makes it patently unfair. That means that the "front page" videos will get increasingly greater attention than the others, and there will be an ever widening gap between the leaders and the also rans. You're replicating the same tiering problem of the current presidential campaign.

Moreover, I find site performance to be rather pokey, which makes it hard to use.

I'm all for developing a technology which can be used to compel the candidates to answer citizens' questions. I've thought deeply about these problems because, like David Colarusso, I've also put a lot of effort into creating technology that could facilitate online democracy. I used to call it Indaba.org. Now it's called ChoiceRanker.com.

The main difference is that I use a ranked choice/Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) interactive ballot rather than a thumbs-up or down contest.

To see what I mean, here's a link to a poll that includes the videos from the CNN/YouTube debate this past summer.

http://www.choiceranker.com/election.php?eid=153

The current implementation of choiceranker is very good at dealing with crowded fields of up to 10 and is OK up to maybe 25 or 50, but it would be better to have some kind of subgroup vetting once the choices exceed a few dozen. I have a strong vision of what needs to be done, but I don't have the resources to do it on my own.

In this overstimulated age, building a better mousetrap isn't enough. You also need to invest in a lot of billboards before people will know where to find your door.

By flywheel at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 2:23pm | login or register to post comments

Randomization

I see now that the 10questions site provides a button to randomize the display of videos. I'd suggest setting things up to invoke it on page load.

By flywheel at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 2:44pm | login or register to post comments

Good suggestion

Perhaps the front page could present 3 separate columns of videos: most popular, newest, and random. I especially think newer videos need more exposure as it will be hard for them to catch up to the number of votes on ones that were posted early on.

By Ruby Sinreich at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 3:36pm | login or register to post comments

on Randomization of 10qs videos

We're aware of the issue, and the site will start to dynamically display a column of "Overlooked" videos on the right-hand third of the front page...as soon as there are enough videos in the system to push some off the front page because of the popularity effect.

Any, any user is free to take the embed code for a particular video and put it on their own site, which means there are plenty of ways for people to drive attention to what they think of as deserving questions.

By Micah L. Sifry at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 3:53pm | login or register to post comments

"Overlooked" is a self-fulfilling prophecy

Relegating newer videos to an "overlooked" section (as was done at Community Counts) formally sequesters less popular videos into a lower tier and further reinforces the "popularity effect" of the leading videos.

But that's probably the best you can do for now. For the long run, consider this: One of the things I was working on was a grid that would open in random order and could then be sorted in various ways (tag, title, author, current popularity, the user's own rating, etc.).

By flywheel at Thu, 10/18/2007 - 5:40pm | login or register to post comments

wou

By der74hva3 at Sat, 03/08/2008 - 7:28pm | login or register to post comments

Interesting, I've already

Interesting, I've already seen this in some forum. If I find the link, i'll put it here.

By der74hva3 at Sun, 03/09/2008 - 7:05pm | login or register to post comments

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