Tech Leaders, Bloggers Call for Truly Open Debates (PC Magazine)
Mark Hachman - ExtremeTech Fri Sep 26, 8:39 AM ET
A collection of bloggers, political activists, and other technology luminaries sent a letter to both presidential candidates on Friday asking them to make the debates truly open to the public.
Lawrence Lessig, the founder for the Center for Internet and Society joined Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales and bloggers from both sides of the aisle in calling for the "wisdom of crowds" to be used as a mechanism for deciding questions used at the second, town-hall presidential debate to be held on Oct. 7.
There, presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama will be asked a series of questions crafted by the public, but selected by the media. The authors of the letter would like the ability to let the most popular questions "bubble up" to where they would be used in the debate.
Coincidentally, Google released a tool to do just that on Wednesday: Google Moderator, designed by Taliver Heath as part of his "20%" project at Google. (Google asks its employees to spend 20 percent of their work time designing their own, self-guided projects.)
"I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked," Heath wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner."
The presidential debates are actually run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, who work with various media organizations and the candidates to set the number, time, location, and format of the debates. The letter's authors appear to believe that the candidates themselves can make the change if they both agree.
"But we do agree that in order for Americans to make the best decision for president, we need open debates that are "of the people" in the ways described above," the letter concludes. "You have the power to make that happen, and we ask you to do so."
Editor's Note: The full text of the letter appears on AppScout: Lessig, Bloggers, Activists Call for Open Debates"