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.

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.

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.

And yes, in any case, this is extremely progressive, and I don’t think we’d have seen anything like this from anyone else.

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.

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.