Changing change.gov
Lots of folks have been making some great recommendations to the Obama transition team via their transition website, change.gov. Lawrence Lessig and a cabal of Internet Big Thinkers suggested some Principals for an Open Transition, public.resource.org has Five Suggestions for Change, and loads of people have been leaving comments and applying for jobs and in general, the level of interactivity with the incoming Obama administration is absolutely unprecedented.
What’s more impressive is the speed at which change.gov has adopted some of these ideas. Mere days after Lessig et al. suggested posting downloadable versions of Obama’s public video addresses (along with the un-downloadable YouTube versions), the videos became available for download in MP4 format, published under a Creative Commons license. That’s very encouraging and very cool.
So I’d like to add my own little suggestion here, which I’ll call Bill Simmon’s Single Suggestion for Simplicity.
It’s not so much a suggestion as it is a question: Where do I leave comments? I’ve been all over the change.gov site and I feel stupid. I can’t find a “leave a comment” link anywhere. I know comments exist, because people keep talking about how great it is to be able to leave them and how responsive the transition team has been. And there has to be commenting somewhere because, using the search feature, I found the site’s commenting policy (which, ironically, is the one place I could find some actual comments).
I think my problem is I’m coming at the site expecting it be like other sites with comments, where the comments appear under the individual posts. Apparently, there are certain special posts under the banner of “Join the Discussion” that the transition team is requesting public comments on. Here is one example, where the site is asking how the economic crisis has affected you. There is no clear navigation to other “join the discussion” topics that I can see (perhaps there are no others?).
My Suggestion for Simplicity is to just have moderated commenting on every post on the site. That would solve the confusion problem. Short of that, the site administrators could make it clear to readers that there are only certain items for which comments are open. After hearing so much brouhaha about change.gov responding to reader comments, it was a pretty frustrating experience clicking around the site looking for this much-vaunted interactivity.
A+ for the willingness to experiment with this at all, C+ for execution.
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Since 2004 Candleblog has been the online journal of Vermont filmmaker, Bill Simmon. Bill and his wife, Emily, use Candleblog as a repository of pop culture ephemera, amusing anecdotes, occasional deep thoughts and anything else they think is web-worthy.
Bill will be presenting a brief talk on the importance of community media at the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The presentation is called Hyperlocal Focus: Growing a Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem.
Candleblog has received the Seven Days "Daysie" Award for Best Vermont Blog (non-political) in 2005, 2007 and 2008.
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As you know (because it was my voiced frustration which led to your Quixotic comment quest), I had the same experience. Of course, I’m sure that our complaints will be branded as left-wing hysteria, and we will be told by Steve Hildebrand “first let’s get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world” before they fix their comment policy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-hildebrand/a-message-to-obamas-progr_b_149089.html
http://change.gov/open_government/yourseatatthetable
“submit your ideas” is embedded in the text of some posts. Also all the links under Agenda have the same thing in the blue box. I can’t find anywhere to read comments though, other than the your seat at the table page.
This one about the economy has the comment link in the text and says “send us you questions or ideas” but if you can’t read responses, how do you get your question answered.
Oops.
http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/the_key_parts_of_the_jobs_plan/
Yes Rob, those are ways you can send in ideas and comments to the site, but as you point out, without being able to read what others have written, it’s not really a comments section like you’d see on other sites. The “Join the Discussion” post does have real comments that you can read, but it’s just that one post. Frustrating navigation.
Still, there are bigger fish to fry and if this is my biggest complaint, we’re doing pretty well.
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