[Peace] Use www.change.gov to post & vote on ideas for Obama's administration!

Stuart Levy slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu
Tue Jan 13 14:55:45 CST 2009


Passing along this note from Nayana Shah:
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As you might know, Obama's government has launched a website: www.change.gov

The website has a place where everyone can share their ideas and vote for ideas
already posted by others. It is called the "Citizen's briefing book"
and following is its description from the website.

Citizen's briefing book:
 
    Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or
    comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will rise to the top -- and be
    gathered into a Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama
    after he is sworn in. 
 
My impression is that this a great opportunity to have your say and lots of
people are taking this opportunity to pen down their ideas about various
issues. The ideas can also be accessed via their category tag such as
"Foreign Policy", "Homeland security", so on so forth. The success of
this initiative rests on a widespread participation. My feeling is that this
citizen's briefing book is not publicized widely enough and that many people
are not aware of its existence. Besides a way of getting your voice heard by
the new government, I think it is also an interesting forum to find out about
and exchange ideas about different issues even amongst various concerned and
involved people.
 
Consider taking a look at the website and also pass on the word to others who
might be interested. Also since ideas are going to be selected via their
rating, when an idea has already been voiced it is better to abstain from
repeating it and to vote for the existent idea instead. 
 
There is one problem with the website: as the number of ideas is growing, it
takes a long time to thoroughly scan through ideas. 

After going through various pages of ideas, it is clear that there are many
ideas that are repeated and there are some clearly popular rising ideas.  I hope
there is someone out there amongst the organizers of the website that goes over
all the ideas at intermittent intervals.

One possibility would be for the same person to identify repeated ideas
and group them together and to put them under a briefly stated heading
which summarizes the idea.  These key points can then be presented
(with an option to read about all detailed writings) so that people
can easily scan, check if their idea has already been covered, and then
vote for it.

I have voiced my opinion through the website but it will be very
useful if many more make the same suggestion or vote for already existent
postings voicing this opinion.

~nayana~



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