Digging Obama's Online Experiment

Yesterday, whitehouse.gov launched its openforquestions page on which users can submit questions for Obama about the economy. He'll answer some of them in an online town hall Thursday.

As readers of this blog and the magazine know, creating interactive web pages on whitehouse.gov is no easy task. At Wired, we can just delete comments from trolls, collect loads of information about you, and experiment with whatever software tools we can find. The government has to deal with questions about censorship if they delete comments, privacy if they keep track of you, and complicated procurement rules to use any kind of software.

That said, let's get a quick look at how openforquestions is working. It's a site modeled in some ways on digg or reddit, but it's all about economic policy.

The first big issue and concern is whether the site will be swarmed with useless questions. The internet is a great tool for harnessing the wisdom of crowds -- and also the idiocy of trolls.

So far, the trolls are doing OK in at least one area: flooding the page with questions about legalizing pot -- a marginally important debate at most times, and a totally trivial one at a time of global economic catastrophe. As of right now, there are 290 questions that have been submitted that include the word "marijuana." By comparison, there are 90 that use the word "manufacturing" and three that contain the word "broadband."

Since the "legalize pot" fans are flooding the site, and voting up each other's questions, they are overwhelming the algorithms that determine which questions matter most to users. Click on the category "budget" and all the top questions are about pot. I'm going to do my best to vote them down since, personally, I think what to do about manufacturing in this country is more important.

The best line of defense though against trolls comes from committed interested in making the site really useful. If they vote good questions up, and bad questions down, it'll work. The hard part of this process, of course, usually, is getting people to vote. But here the White House is doing amazingly well. As of right now, they've got about 575,000 votes and 15,000 users. That means the average user is voting on 38 other people's questions. The result is that there are smart and complicated questions listed at the top of most of the other categories.

Here's one of the top questions on in the Jobs category: "What are your plans to encourage corporations to keep middle class jobs, such as customer service call centers and transactional based support services like accounting and computer program jobs, in the U.S?" Interesting stuff. I'd like to know what the president thinks of this.

I would however also like more ways to dig through the data. I can click on the name of another user, but I can't see how he's voted. I can't see what questions particularly concern users in New York. I can't network with friends or, heck, see what people connected to me on Facebook are doing. I also would like my own ways of sorting the comments I see first. For example, I'd want buttons on "new", "hot," "most-voted-on" etc... .

One can't take the White House to task for this too severely, however. For starters, a whitehouse.gov page has to be extremely easy to use. Every feature or gimmick that will attract a small number of geeky users might alienate normal users. Secondly, the government has intense restrictions on the software tools it can use. Third, and most important, the Obama team is just starting in this process.

Overall, Team Obama deserves high marks. Opening a free-flowing site where people can submit questions is a risk. It might backfire, but it might also help point the way toward a very interesting new way for the president to communicate with the country.

One big question remains: will Obama cherry pick questions that lead into policies he has already developed and that he likes discussing? Or will he pick the hardest, most-complicated, and most important questions? We'll have an idea tomorrow.