With Inauguration in two days, Barack Obama‘s website is bouncing with activity. The website uses a technique that has never been used before – the opinions of people on the Internet could actually affect the different decisions in government.

Web 2.0 on Change.gov

There a couple ways for users to interact on Change.gov. First, users can add their own stories to Change.gov. These stories can be anything – what your personally want the Obama-Biden team to work on, a story about how

the United States changed your life, etc. The website gives the impression that the Obama-Biden team will use these suggestions to decide on key issues, but I’m not sure if they actually will. We will talk more about that later. Second, users can post on discussion topics that cover key issues. These discussion topics are fairly popular -

around 5,000 comments each. The topics are only open for a short amount of time until they are locked. The discussion is powered by IntenseDebate. Again, I’m not sure if these comments mean anything. They may be used by the team, or they may not. Third, users can ask the team questions. This is probably the best feature available because the team actually answers these questions (or at least some of them). During a round, users can add questions or vote for other questions that they like. Probably only the questions with lots of votes are looked at by the team. According to Change.gov, 103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes. The fact that only 100k people submitted almost 5 million votes is frightening. This means that on average, a user cast 50 votes. This isn’t a very good involvement rate. The thoughts and ideas only represent those of 100k people.

Is the team using this data?

I’m not sure if the team is using the stories submitted or comments on key discussion topics, but I know for sure that they are using the questions added. A few questions have been formally addressed by Obama, like this excerpt from an interview on ABC’s “This Week” (January 11, 2009):

STEPHANOPOULOS: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, “Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.”

OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering [up].
(source)

This is pretty cool. Also seen during the debate period of the election, submissions from people on the Internet are actually being seen by Obama (and other members of his team). I hope that this will continue after Obama takes office – this will truly show how Web 2.0 has changed the world.

Tags: Barack Obama, Change.gov, Government, Web 2.0