Obama's change.gov raises the strategy bar

[Guest guest]

" To proponents, these efforts by Obama's team to build a Web-based network

of support can democratize the government anew. To skeptics, however,

change.gov is little more than a clever public-relations device, a way to

keep Obama's fans revved up and give them the illusion of influence. "

Call me a skeptic. - Lenny

Obama's change.gov raises the strategy bar

By Greve

McClatchy Newspapers

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/1470387.html

Has a presidential adviser ever before asked you to tell her where the

economic crisis is hurting you personally? Has a future Cabinet member ever

sought your ideas for improving health care?

Barack Obama's incoming administration does both on its transition Web site,

change.gov, and the appeals are drawing thousands of e-mail respondents. So

is the site's invitation to " share with us your concerns and hopes, " and

more than 300,000 people have taken up the invitation to apply for political

appointments.

Want to join a policy debate? Your e-mail will appear on change.gov. Readers

then rate your submission using icons whose thumbs are up or down.

Submissions that are deemed the best rise to the top of the screen.

To proponents, these efforts by Obama's team to build a Web-based network of

support can democratize the government anew. To skeptics, however,

change.gov is little more than a clever public-relations device, a way to

keep Obama's fans revved up and give them the illusion of influence.

" Change.gov is obviously fantastic, " said tech-prognosticator Clay Shirky,

the author of the book " Here Comes Everybody, " an upbeat prediction of what

networked people can accomplish.

" Just the idea that the president-elect is soliciting ideas from outside the

traditional pool is a profound potential change, " Shirky said. " It convinces

people that they can be involved in government, and it creates the

expectation that this is how Obama will govern. "

All, a Republican consultant who's known for Internet creativity,

thinks that the revolution is well under way. Future presidents will find it

impossible to abandon Obama's innovations in openness, he said. " So they're

setting precedents before people realize what's happening. "

If they're ever analyzed carefully, all the submissions to Obama might yield

what's often called the wisdom of crowds and make leaders smarter and their

governance enlightened, proponents say. Indeed, what Shirky and others

envision is that Obama would yield significant power to the will and

ingenuity of socially networked activists.

There's no guarantee of that, however. About all that's clear is that

change.gov is a place to learn and talk about what the new administration

might do, and to ask for a job application.

According to skeptic Hindman, the author of " The Myth of Internet

Democracy, " change.gov may simply be a new application of " an effective

political strategy that Obama has pursued before. It's listening: getting

across that he listens to and pays attention to people, including those who

think differently from the way he thinks. "

That assumes that someone in the Obama camp is paying close attention to

what people submit to change.gov, but that's not clear, either. Indeed, the

huge number of submissions raises its own question: Who reads them?

" We have an incredible group of volunteers who read through the essays with

a goal of reading through all of them if possible, " e-mailed Jen Psaki, an

Obama transition press aide.

A few submissions have been singled out on change.gov, including suggestions

for health-care restructuring. They may not be yielding much insight,

however.

For example, two of the three health-care ideas that Tom Daschle, Obama's

expected choice for health and human services secretary, lauded from more

than 3,700 responses came from the first of 59 pages of suggestions.

While Daschle hailed all three in a YouTube video posted on change.gov as

" fantastic ideas from the American public, " two - preventive medicine and

cost containment - have been major topics in the health-care debate for

years. The third idea, a Peace Corps-like Health Service Corps, already

appears elsewhere on change.gov as an Obama proposal.

Then there's the question of how thousands of job applications from people

seeking political appointments in the Obama administration are read.

According to a recent New York Times story, " more than 50 staff aides " are

classifying and downloading a record 300,000 e-mail applications for roughly

3,300 positions. (That's 6,000 applications per aide.) The number of

applicants is expected to double by Inauguration Day.

" Good luck! " reading their submissions, responded Marlyn McGrath, the

director of admissions at Harvard College, where, she said, a single

thorough reading of a typical applicant's file takes about 45 minutes.

When it comes to discerning good new policy ideas, the thumbs-up system of

taking readers' favorite submissions to the top may not be helping much,

either. That's due to what Lillian Lee, a language-processing researcher,

calls a " rich get richer " bias.

" High-ranked posts are put at the top of the page so that lower-ranked posts

are never seen in order to be rated in the first place, " explained Lee, who

teaches computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Mitch Kapor, a new-media pioneer and philanthropist who's been advising

Obama's team, raised a larger concern about the emerging e-democracy: " Not

everybody is online. Among those who are online, the number who are

comfortable with Facebook, My-Space and Twitter is very small. Most of my

friends and colleagues forget that. "

According to a survey in May by the Pew Internet and American Life Project,

41 percent of non-Hispanic blacks don't use the Internet. Nor do 65 percent

of people older than 65. A third of rural residents and more than half of

Americans who never finished high school don't use the Internet, either.

That will change, Internet-governance advocates say, and they draw great

encouragement from change.gov's innovations in its first month, however

flawed.

Rasiej, founder of a Web site, www.personaldemocracy.com, that

promotes Internet-aided political engagement, says the new model of citizen

participation " will be as revolutionary for the American public as the

discovery that the world was round was for seafarers. "

Then again, about 38 percent of Americans didn't bother to vote in November,

a reminder that citizen engagement remains spotty at even the most basic

level.