White House Opens Up For Questions About The Economy

from the but-what-about-answers? dept

I've been a bit critical for the Obama administration's lack of transparency and inclusion on certain issues -- or rather, their claims of being "transparent" and "inclusive" by simply asking their mailing list to "sell" the packages put together in backrooms. I was hoping for a much more participatory process whereby citizens actually could take part a bit earlier in the process. So, it's good to see a step in the right direction, as the White House has announced its Open For Questions initiatives (thanks to everyone who sent this in). The site lets people ask questions of the president, and lets people see and vote on each other's questions. The President will then answer a few of the "top" questions.

This is definitely a nice thing to add, but I'm hopeful that it ends up going further. At this point, it seems like nothing much more than a glorified suggestion/Q&A box. Rather than involving the community to tackle the questions raised, it simply gives them to the President to answer back. Real participation is about allowing the community to help out -- not just pass big questions up to the top. Obviously, it's still quite early in the administration, so hopefully we'll see more participatory tools on the way as well. This is definitely a good step -- and I don't mean to take away from it. But, I'm going to keep pushing for further participation and further transparency because I think it could be quite powerful and transformative.

Filed Under: obama, participation, q&a, transparency

Year End Live Q&A

from the going-out-with-a-bang dept

As promised here's today's year end Q&A. We'll try to keep the topic focused on what we thought were the biggest stories from 2008 and what will be the biggest stories in 2009, and see how well that works. We had some problems last week with the CoverItLive software, but hopefully this week will work better. The folks from CoverItLive have been in touch and are working hard to get rid of some of the bugs we encountered. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what people think were/are the biggest stories:

Filed Under: q&a

End Of The Year Live Q&A

from the looking-forward,-looking-back dept

We had a lot of fun last week with the live Q&A that we did, and a bunch of folks have asked us to do it again -- so we'll try for doing another one, the same time as last week: 1:30 pm PT on Tuesday (tomorrow), December 30th (if you need to figure out what that is in your time zone, check here). Some folks asked for a theme to make the discussion more coherent, so let's try to talk about what we think the biggest stories of 2008 were, and what will be the biggest stories in 2009.

Filed Under: q&a

Live Q&A Time!

from the experiments... dept

As mentioned yesterday, we're going to try to run a little experiment here with a "live Q&A/chat." It's not a fully open chat in that you submit questions, and I'll choose some to respond to, and only those questions will show up in the chat window -- so don't expect questions to show up immediately. Anyway, for this first one, since it's a holiday week, we'll leave the topic pretty open -- but questions should focus on the sorts of things we commonly talk about here on the blog, from business models and economics to public policy, intellectual property, etc. Basically, anything that you think will be interesting to other folks here. For now, I'm planning to keep it running for about an hour (until about 2:30pm PT). After that, the proceedings will be available to read via archive... So, let's give this a shot:

Filed Under: q&a

Live Q&A Tuesday Afternoon?

from the experiments... dept

While there actually has been a fair amount of news so far this week, on the whole, work-wise, it's a relatively slow week, with plenty of folks on vacation already. I was thinking that it might be fun to try a little experiment. One of my favorite baseball blogs, River Avenue Blues has been holding what it calls Live Chats every week or so, using the Cover It Live real-time blogging system. It's not so much an open chat as it is a real-time Q&A session, with readers submitting questions for one of the site's writers to answer, concerning various goings-on in the baseball world. I honestly have no clue how well that sort of format would work around here, but I thought it might be fun to at least experiment. We'll shoot for trying just such a live Q&A/chat around 1:30 pm PT tomorrow, Tuesday. Hopefully you can join us.

Filed Under: q&a