This was a great idea and I'd like to see it a continuing process and to have it improved as time proceeds. The specifics are:
1) That it continue and that the President respond to the top items each week. That way there would be a continuing conversation.
2) That the procedures for finding ideas be improved, perhaps by open sourcing it, so that a user could show the Idea titles ordered by say: Recent, Top, Controversial, Tag, Title-Contents, Tag, and others that I don't think about.
3) Start moving toward threaded, rated... comments so that it might be easer to benefit form the comment stream.
4) Attach a Pro and a Con WIKI to each idea to see if the people who voted Pro, and Con could develop detailed proposals for their ideas. (Note: this might not work, but I'd like to see if it did)
5) Try to involve our representatives and allow them to comment on the ideas and identify their comment
6) Add a "Preview" (I forget if this is implemented, though I'd replace "Post" by "Preview and then Post") and "Speller" so that the submitter could see who the posting and comment looks before it is submitted.
Others... I'd be interested to read other suggestions and cements on the specifics by people who, hopefully, could make constructive additions and modifications to this idea
Comments (6)
Yes, definitely agree, especially given the limited time to participate - and the lack of adequate advance publicity for the process.
Among the necessary improvements - suggested in a comment elsewhere - would be to display the votes for and against each idea, rather than just the difference between positive and negative responses. At present the actual voting record is only visible by mousing over the net favorable vote.
Is 'Contue' a contraction of 'Continue'? I am unfamiliar with the letter combination; the author should make a correction/explanation!
Yes, My Bad, I think I tried to spell check the body, but did not catch the titles "Contue", thanks...
I'd like to be able to edit my idea in case I left something out or needed to clarify. Or to adjust it in response to something brought up iin comments.
Require that the public be allowed to vote on legislation proposed in the house and Senate and that the public commentary be given equal weight as the senate and congressional votes. In other words if there are 100 senators each with one vote, the public gets 100 votes which would be distributed among yes and no and reflect the percentages of public opiinion measured by online voting. Now THERE's a way to get people to participate iin government!!
1) re: lihu, Having the administration interact would be a do-able step, where as allowing the public to directly vote would, I think require a constutional amendment and is lots more difficult, and is a major change in our government, I'd vote against that for now until we have much better experience as to the way these polls worked. Note: I did also propose that individuals be able to "Allow people to allocate a percent of their taxes." that would allow some direct control of the government.
2) Some more suggestions: Allow people to see the Yes% in the header and allow them to view the ideas in order of Yes% or No%, that way ideas that are popular (or unpopular) by the people who voted on them could be seen.