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October 17, 2006
Debate 2.0: Gubernatorial Blogging as an Exercise in E-Democracy
For the last week, there's been an extraordinary online exercise taking place in Minnesota. Actually, it's taking place in cyberspace - a 10-day gubernatorial e-debate in which the six leading candidates for governor are interacting on a group blog. Moderated by online democracy whiz Steve Clift in partnership with e-democracy.org and the Blandin Foundation, the e-debate takes advantage of a variety of Web 2.0 tools to give the public a whole new way of observing - and participating - in a political debate.
The debate began as a video blog, with each candidate posting a brief introduction on YouTube. These have been followed by a series of questions, answers and rebuttals on a wide range of topics, from the digital divide to healthcare to the national guard. Different questions request the candidates to respond in different formats. For example, a question on what the candidates would do to improve access to wifi and broadband would only allow a 70-word response, forcing the candidates to be succinct, while discussions on healthcare could be open-ended. Candidates could submit their responses by email or by voicemail, which would be transcribed by the debate organizers.
Meanwhile, the public can participate in a variety of ways. They can follow the debate on the website, as well as via rss and email. The responses include a rating system, allowing the public to grade them on a scale of one to five (the average rating seems to be around 2.5 at the moment.) All the candidates' responses can be reused according to a Creative Commons attribution license, meaning anyoen can do pretty much anything they want with it as long as they cite the e-debate website as its source.
For those people who wish to dive into the debate, Steve and his colleagues have set up multiple platforms for online interaction. You can join their bulletin board or e-list. You can upload your photos or video to Flickr.com YouTube respectively and tag them "mn06," which causes them to be displayed automatically in a photo gallery. If you have a microphone one you computer, you can record audio comments. And of course, they're aggregating blog post that mention the debate.
On the whole, I've been very impressed with the e-debate so far. The website is easy to use, allowing for various forms of multimedia while recognizing the importance of accessibility and low-bandwidth access. In some ways, though, the e-debate mimics the modern political debate a little too closely, with only limited direct interaction between the candidates. I would love to see more instances where candidates are responding directly to each other's posts rather than sticking to their pre-determined answers. I'd also love to see more of a public imprimatur on the individual questions, as in "Jenny Malcomsen of St. Paul asks, 'What would your administration do in regards to immigration reform," with their questions being presented in the media format of their choice. But these are small bones to pick in comparison to what's being accomplished.
Once again, Steve Clift is making the world safe for e-democracy - and every politician should take notice. -andy
Tags: digital divide | e-democracy | e-government | mobcasting | odeo | politics | tagging | video blogging | web 2.0 | youtube
Posted by acarvin at October 17, 2006 9:54 AM
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