The White House web site has a section to allow for people to post questions openly (as opposed to the normal sending a message to the President). I think that anything that improves communication is a good thing, but in this case the White House has made some errors in the technology that effect the openness of the process. The Google Moderator system that is being used is hidden within a frame within a frame within Javascript has some serious errors. Neither of the three pages that have been combined into one are valid: White House page with 8 errors, the framed actual page with 7 errors, and the Javascript generated page with 119 errors (no links possible due to Javascript generation, however, can be recreated using Firefox extension Web Developer bar to capture generated HTML code and then pasted into the Validator). But the biggest problem is that the generated page does not seem to be Section 508 compliant. According to a test by the HiSoftware® Cynthia Says™ - Web Content Accessibility Report the frame within a frame does not comply with Section 508 (508 Standards, Section 1194.22, (a)). Do note that testing the main page will appear to comply with the Section 508, but that is only because it is difficult to test internal web page frames. The actual framed application is hosted at Google and not the White House. Also, because everything is generated by Javascript, some people may be at a disadvantage as reading anything in the application (and if Javascript is disabled then the warning/NO SCRIPT message says, "Google Moderator is a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations and events. You must have JavaScript enabled in order to use this feature."The page is definitely not designed to be machine readable/processable, but that is only needed if this application was to be open for searching, analysis, external archiving, and interoperability.
So will it serve to provide a new means to access the President? Currently anyone can send a question to the President by filling out a web form at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/. For over two hundred years, people have sent questions and comments to Presidents without having them voted on to receive a response. So what is the point of voting for questions? In the case of this Open for Questions, the President will provide answers on camera and viewed by anyone with an Internet connection (assuming a transcript will follow). So in a sense there is a qualitative difference with an on camera spoken answer. Also, there is an element of the lottery here with creating a personal connection with the questioner (who would not want that type of attention). And although the method of voting is essentially a popularity contest, that does serve to help find out what is on the mind of most citizens. However, the system does not cull for quality of the questions either by setting up editorial tools (e.g. Wiki technology, MixedInk...), by allowing expert moderation or advanced aggregation techniques (see Stuart Shulman's tool for analysis of public comments to federal agencies). I guess the real test will be on how the public judges the answers (though probably no judging by votes of the public on the answers unless someone external sets up that system).
But all in all it is great that the White House is trying to create new venues for citizen participation. There are not easy or obvious answers. But my hope is in the future that the government agencies follow certain principles: first to be as accessible as possible; second make tools that use open standards so that it is easier to archive, integrate and participate in more ways; third, actually test or audit all systems to insure that the first two are followed. Unfortunately, Open for Questions is not yet open enough, seeming having failed the validity, accessibility and open standards tests.
(this article also posted at ValidSites with information about the importance of valid HTML)-----
During testing, the page did not work in Internet Explorer 8 in Vista (sorry no screen shots), however, by the morning of the event the site finally worked with the browser.
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For further reading on new methods for citizen participation: http://www.advocatehope.org/project-papers/communicating-with-congress-by-way-of-advocacy
Also a link to the Google Blog posting: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/citizen-participation-that-scales-call.html
