(2009-06-24) Obama Open Gov Participation Progress

Saul Hansell on the tricky bits of optimizing public participation in the Barack Obama OpenGov discussion.

Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama's true place of birth. (Among the technical ideas that got a lot of support was a proposal to have the federal government press states and cities to follow open-government principles and a call for a central Internet site for all requests to the president and Congress, modeled after a site for petitions to the British prime minister.) "This is Obama's Madisonian moment," said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and the author of "Here Comes Everybody," a book about Internet collaboration. Just as James Madison, the nation's fourth president, argued during the drafting of the Constitution that the government must protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority, Mr. Shirky said that government must also prevent small groups of loudmouths from hijacking the public debate.

On Monday, the White House began Phase 3 of its project using yet another format: a Wiki, an online tool that allows a group of people to collectively create and edit documents. Visitors will be able to submit and edit drafts of the open-government rules, similar to how people contribute to Wikipedia, the user-created online encyclopedia.