The White House used Google’s Moderator and AppEngine this week to gather topics for Thursday’s town hall meeting. The tactic was introduced as an experiment by Obama earlier in the week.
The experiment was a success, but it wasn’t free of mess.
The president’s Open For Questions town meeting on Thursday, March 26, used Google technology to collect 104,009 questions from 92,937 people, who ranked questions with more than than 3.6 million votes.
During the Town Hall meeting, the president answered seven questions at length. A little over 24 hours later, I can’t recall many specifics from his reponses, though. In this case, the process used for this town hall meeting overshadowed the content.
Honestly, the most interesting thing to me during this first attempt at a virtual town hall meeting is THE DATA. I think we can learn more about the economy from the level of participation, 100k+ questions submitted and 3.6 million related votes than from the few political responses they generated. With this in mind, here’s a high-level overview of participation in the context of social media.
Questions about financial stability dominated concerns, based on submissions:
- Financial Stability (20,662 questions)
- Jobs (14,496 questions)
- Education (13,708 questions)
- Budget (13,106 questions)
- Health Care Reform (12,645 questions)
- Home Ownership (7,969 questions)
- Green Jobs & Energy (7,441 questions)
- Small Business (4,055 questions)
- Retirement Security (3,570 questions)
- Auto Industry (3,166 questions)
- Veterans (3,151 questions)
Buzz
I think the level of voting on topics is a good way to measure buzz. The political buzz is highest on the for job, budget and education topics:
- Jobs (924,761 votes)
- Budget (554,279 votes)
- Education (465,202 votes)
- Financial Stability (385,328 votes)
- Health Care Reform (384,742 votes)
- Green Jobs & Energy (324,766 votes)
- Home Ownership (185,049 votes)
- Retirement Security (112,978 votes)
- Veterans (106,834 votes)
- Small Business (88,730 votes)
- Auto Industry (71,912 votes)
With more time and access to the data, I think it would be great to measure the volume of positive, negative and neutral sentiment for each of these topics. The fact that visitors could vote both ‘for’ and ‘against’ questions makes measuring sentiment even more interesting!
Relevance
I think the relevance of topics is best measured by individual participation. The topics of jobs, education, and financial stability have the most political relevance:
- Jobs (35,777 people)
- Education (28,427 people)
- Financial Stability (27,055 people)
- Budget (26,576 people)
- Health Care Reform (23,700 people)
- Green Jobs & Energy (20,105 people)
- Home Ownership (14,178 people)
- Small Business (8,862 people)
- Retirement Security (8,744 people)
- Veterans (7,968 people)
- Auto Industry (7,815 people)
I’m happy that Obama’s team is leaving the data from the event online for data junkies. I’d like to spend more time looking at why many topics ranked differently for question volume, buzz and relevance. I’d also like to generate some keyword clouds questions based on keyword queries.
How will Obama’s team plans to use the data is unclear. According to their post-event summary, they “will be trying to address more of the questions the President could not get to over the next week or so, and will continue looking for new ways to engage with the public and get your input.”
It’s all good. Except, perhaps the #1 question that floated to the surface of the virtual town all process.
And the Winner Is…
The number one question, submitted by :
With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals? - Ryan Palmer of Dallas, Texas (with 7,924 votes)
Obama’s response:
“The answer is no, I don’t think that’s a good strategy to grow our economy. All right.”
Credits: T-shirt image for this post is the Obama Sez design from Zazzle.com.
Introductions: Obama’s video introduction of the ‘Open for Questions’ Town hall format received nearly one quarter of a million views on YouTube. After viewing 26 pages of user comments on YouTube, by favorite was still a republished quote from JFK: “No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.”
About Troy Janisch