How Change.gov Fosters Meaningful Conversations

December 2, 2008

There’s some great work being done on Change.gov right now. I got an email earlier today inviting me to participate in a discussion on health care with a link to a blog post featuring a video of Senator Tom Daschle and transition staffer Lauren Aronson discussing comments about health care that they’ve received through Change.gov. Here it is:

As a social media strategist, particularly as a government social media strategist, I am extremely impressed with this campaign. A few observations from this particular blog post and video:

The video is well-produced, but not overly polished.

The Change.gov team appear to have established some styling conventions that mesh nicely with the design of the rest of the site. Figuring out how to use presidential seals, colors, type-faces, opening and closing titles, etc ahead of time allow them consistently knock out good—and official—looking content (video or otherwise) without too much work.

They seem to have a few cameras and a good sound recording system, but they clearly didn’t build a studio for this video and they probably didn’t spend a ton of time editing it. You’ve got to be able to put things out fast if you want to engage in timely discussions with people. I imagine Obama’s campaign video guru, Arun Chaudhary, is behind this.

The video is conversational, and it’s about conversations.

They may have rehearsed it once or twice, but the tone of the video is chatty. Senator Daschle and Lauren talk to one another about comments they’ve received from people, naming the commenters where they can, highlighting compelling anecdotes, and thanking the commenters.

The video encourages more conversation.

Recognizing good comments, naming the commenters, and indicating that they’re taking comments under advisement are great ways to encourage other people to chime in on the issue. This blog post went live at around noon EST. As I write this, 9 hours later, it’s received 1,602 comments. Absolutely staggering. No better way to invite people to comment by showing the future senator for Health and Human Services reading comments from ordinary citizens.

The commenting system is actually a conversation system.

The gurus at Blue State Digital (the firm behind Change.gov) decided to use IntenseDebate to power the Change.gov blog’s commenting system. This is significant for a number of reasons:

It discourages anonymity by requiring people to log-in with an email address, thereby encouraging people to take responsibility for their posts. As an added bonus (for nerds like me), you can log in using OpenID.
It features a simple and intuitive one-click system to rate comments up or down, reminding people that they should think before they speak.
It highlights commenters whose comments receive a lot of positive ratings, further encouraging people to add constructive thoughts to the discussion while giving readers clues as to which of the 1,600+ comments are worth reading.
It allows threaded conversations, encouraging commenters to discuss issues and develop ideas with one another, rather than simply asking them to respond to the blog post.

The layout of IntenseDebate’s comments isn’t perfect, but visually making sense out of comments when one comes in every 20 seconds is nearly impossible. The rating system is the real champion of the system. Kudos to IntenseDebate for providing a much-needed addition to blogging, especially as the leaders of the free world start inviting these conversations.

I’m generally skeptical about inviting the whole world into grand policy discussions, but I feel good about this.

As I discussed with Pete Ashdown a few months ago, I worry that inviting legions of non-experts into discussions on policies will slow the policy making process even further. I don’t care what most people think about health policy, and I’d wager that most of the 1,600 comments on this particular blog post aren’t worth reading.

My concerns are assuaged (somewhat), by IntenseDebate’s technology. IntenseDebate’s system is a great example of a simple emergent system, that is, a system that leverages a lot of small interactions (i.e. comments and simple votes on comments) to highlight and promote remarkable ideas. This doesn’t ensure that bad ideas won’t be highlighted, but, by and large, it’s a great way to use social technology to separate (a lot of) the wheat from (most of) the chaff.

And, it bears repeating: nothing will encourage a thoughtful conversation more than knowing that Tom Daschle (or someone on his staff) is listening to comments. You can’t have a conversation unless someone’s listening.

Bonus observations:

Daschle’s glasses are still totally awesome
He tends to tilt when he’s in front of the camera (I do the same thing)

If you liked this (you should have), you might also like:

Short link to this post:

http://factoryjoe.com/ Chris Messina

This is indeed exciting stuff — and I’m amazed that they seem to be getting that conversational tone right — like holy crap! — these guys might really care!
http://jedsundwall.com Jed

Yes, they might!

They certainly have the right spirit. The more I think about it, the more excited I get about how IntenseDebate (or any other tool that enables emergence) is going to enhance our representative democracy. The current system of bombarding representatives with letters and emails is extremely costly and largely ineffective.

This is a great way to use technology to float powerful anecdotes and ideas from constituents up into policy debates.
http://www.levjoy.com/blog/ Josh Levy

Yup, this is great stuff, though is it really “open” or just giving the friendly impression of being open?

In any case, I keep trying to image what Hillary or McCain’s transition would have been like — would there have been anything remotely like this? Not likely.
http://jedsundwall.com Jed

Well, it’s certainly an open discussion, but there’s certainly no guarantee that any of these comments are actually going to inform policy. I’m presuming that your definition of open would require access to a finer debate of actual policy—something like http://www.publicmarkup.org/. Am I reading you right?

And yes, in any case, this is extremely progressive, and I don’t think we’d have seen anything like this from anyone else.
http://blog.epa.gov/blog/ Jeffrey Levy

Fantastic post! I was just selling social media to several communicators today and this is the kind of thing they need to read.

That voting system sounds terrific! For policy purposes, but also for contests. Are there sites that would allow people to upload a photo or video and allow others to vote up or down?

But, and I have to say this, IntenseDebate has the usual indemnification and jurisdiction issues in their terms of service, like YouTube. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the transition does when they’re actually in government. Here’s hoping they meet with these companies to work out a generic TOS for gov’t that wipes it all away and frees us up to use these tools.
Alex Hunsucker

I love the inclusion of IntenseDebate. There is (typically) nothing worse than reading blog comments with anonymous posters except for a good laugh, and it certainly helps float to the top the most relevant comments. Every major website with a blog should have something similar.

However, I’m still extremely skeptical any of this is really going to lead to citizen developed policy because in the end this is still about politics. The idea that the administration would incorporate an unpopular policy decision to centric America b/c a few thousand commenters asked for it would probably be naive on our part, and a good thing that they don’t. But then, I’m cynical like that. As Josh said though, it does give nice warm and fuzzies compared to what we would have gotten from McCain or Hillary. Either way, a giant step in the right direction.

I’m hoping when they’re actually in office we’ll get to see some really interesting things – citizens determining what the weekly address will be about through the internet, etc. There’s a hell of a lot of opportunity there.
http://jedsundwall.com Jed

Thanks for the comments, guys.

Jeffrey: I’m beginning to believe that development of a template for gov’t friendly terms of service should be a top priority of the new dept of commerce (it’s my understanding the commerce lawyers are currently working on this issue). Someone tell Bill Richardson.

Alex, believe it or not, I (unfortunately) share your cynicism. I imagine the opening of comments is motivated to a large extent by a desire for good PR—to make it look like they’re listening.

That said, I don’t think it will be long before remarkable anecdotes from blog comments are mentioned in policy debates. As Pete Ashdown said “Facts and real evidence rise to the top and preserve themselves.” Technologies like IntenseDebate can help reveal these facts and “real” evidence.

Having small armies of people voting up good comments is a better way for constituents to make their voices heard than organizing costly and inefficient campaigns to flood representatives’ offices with letters and emails. It saves a lot of work for staffers, and it’s a great way to motivate people to get involved and think deeply about policy issues.

And, I elect my representatives to be able to tell bad policy ideas from good ones, even if they come from blog comments. I don’t expect anyone to copy and paste comments into a bill, but I think comments can certainly inform policies.
http://www.concretestained.net Acid Staining

The video is well-produced, but not overly polished.