Intellectual Property Law

A group of plugged-in politicos recently petitioned the Commission on Presidential Debates to open up the general election debates to the public.

In addition to asking that the CPD to make the video feed of the debates freely available, the group asked the commission to allow the public to select the questions to be posed to the candidates:

The two campaigns recently said of the October 7 debate, ?In the spirit of the Town Hall, all questions will  come from the audience (or Internet), and not the moderator.? We agree with the spirit of this statement. In  order to ensure that the Internet portion of this debate is true bottom-up democracy, the format needs to  allow the public to help select the questions in addition to asking them.

This cycle?s YouTube debates were a milestone for Internet participation in presidential debates. But they  put too much discretion in the hands of gatekeepers. Many of the questions chosen by TV producers were  considered gimmicky and not hard-hitting enough, and never would have bubbled up on their own.

This ?bubble up? idea is the essence of the Internet as we know it. The best ideas rise to the top, and the  wisdom of crowds prevails. We?d propose debate organizers utilize existing bubble-up voting technology and choose Internet questions from the top 25 that bubbled up. We ask you to instruct the October 7 debate planners to use bubble-up technology in this fashion.

Google launched its Google Moderator tool Friday. Katie Jacobs Stanton, a member of Google's elections and moderator teams, described it this way: "It's a free tool which enables communities to submit and vote on questions for debates, presentations and events. This way, the best and most representative questions rise to the top."

One of the featured series on Google's site lets users compose and vote on questions to the presidential candidates. This feature, for now however, is just an experiment. There's no word yet whether Tom Brokaw has even heard of the tool, or whether he intends to pay any attention to it before he poses questions to the presidential candidates October 7 when the two candidates participate in a townhall question-and-answer session in Nashville, Tennessee.

See Also:

• Campaigns Blow Off Voters During Final Stretch of Debates