Friday, November 14, 2008

Online congressional and other public hearings?

When Barack Obama sent a thank-you text message to supporters—on his way to the victory speech—saying he couldn’t have done it without us, I thought that was nice to address us first. I replied “You’re welcome, buddy. Keep us involved.”

Wired Obama supporters have been thinking a lot about how the power of his online communities might be harnessed to do some good beyond getting him elected.

What would you think about bringing public hearings into the online world? It wouldn’t have to be exactly like Capitol Hill hearings. Hearings have taken to the road for a long time, but they tend to keep to the same formal rules.

A different kind of supplementary input might be put in place so that testimony could be given via one of the live video services, in shorter chunks, and by a different class of witnesses—more ordinary citizens, more front-line experts, fewer heads of agencies and heads of interest groups. (The higher you climb on the title ladder, the less you learn about what’s happening and the more you learn about what the establishment wants you to think is happening.) It would be less formal than hearings held in Washington, but more official than a town hall.

Live commentary on the testimony could be mined not just for reaction to the testimony but also for ideas. It could shape the direction of the hearings in real time.

I don’t believe anybody thinks Joe citizen should vote to decide things like how to fix the economy. But swarms do one thing very well: they ferret out the important, consequential bits of an issue, situation or conversation. When this happens in real time, we’re saying “Yes, more of that, please. Now.” We’re like players in a game of hide the thimble, telling the hunter if she’s hot or cold, closer or further away from the prize, or the essence of a thing.

If our representatives in government take the trouble to listen, and if they are canny about it, they’ll use that power to navigate the issue terrain.

Later: Brian Solis pens a good roundup of Obama’s use of social media during the campaign and and floats ideas for using it for governing. The stat that popped out at me:

YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000, with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for 110 million views.

While the ratio of Obama-to-McCain subscribers was about 2:1, the video posting ratio was more like 5:1. So, it’s not just that the McCain campaign was stuck in the 20th century in terms of thinking of the electorate as an audience; McCain supporters thought of themselves as the audience.