Google is getting some major national exposure for both its AppEngine platform and Google Moderator, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The White House is using Moderator, hosted on AppEngine, to determine which questions President Obama should answer at an online Town Hall meeting on Thursday.
In just a few hours 6,932 people have submitted 7,037 questions and cast 236,048 votes on the site – which proves out the AppEngine promise that you can build highly scalable applications with little effort. The top question, based on votes so far, is “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month. What is the government doing to make higher education more affordable for lower and middle class families?”
Google also hosts the President’s video message for the meeting, on YouTube. I’m surprised he’s not wearing a Google tshirt, too. Google should be paying him an endorsement fee for all this promotion (Obama previously used Moderator for his Change.gov transition site).
See our recent coverage of Google Tip Jar, which also uses Moderator.
That is indeed superb endorsment. A thank you for campaign supprt?
What you say!
Google paid enough election fund for obama.. It is time to return.
Isn’t it beautiful, our corporate Congress?
The corporate part.
Thank you Eric! Better stuff here.
-TC
Hope Dworaczyk http://hopedwor...os.blogspot.com
It’s good.
KTHXBAI
Google offers free, useful, and scalable tools which are utilized by the president’s web-adept staff. Why the “they should be paying him” sarcasm?
I agree! Should they have built their own system instead? Or would you have expected an endorsement fee be paid by whichever company provided the solution, Google or not?
Obviously they should be spending taxpayer money to develop their own tools, duh.
Yup, where each of these apps would have a 10-20M budget.
That’s a cool news. A gr8 exposure for Google too..
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Populism 2.0
How ’bout a bailout for student loans?
Here is why that won’t happen http://www.roll..._big_takeover/5
Spoiling students/children will usually make them weaker in the long run. Adversity, hardships and challenges should be welcomed for Innovation and great invention.
what does that even mean?
“suffering builds character”. its true, but then again, ramen isn’t the greatest nourishment for the human brain, either.
ok but what does it have to do with anything?
I believe Joe was suggesting the gov cancel student loans (there’s actually a facebook group that wants to do this). Aki was countering that it is better for them to suffer.
Can anyone post a real comment ? !
pretty nifty idea, and certainly good for building support, but there’s a good reason the architects of the constitution opted for a represenative democracy.
Obama should step aside so that we can have Eric Schmidt as president.
Populism 2.0
Google taking over the world… aaaahhh!
TechFilipino
THATS the top question so far? Wow, guess we are in more trouble than we thought.
The first sentence of the question wasn’t even a sentence: “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month.” Uh, yeah. Maybe he should have asked why he can’t write better.
I wonder how’s the demographics on the that surevey? And anyway, if these guys are working full time and studying full time, how come they have time to spend on these polls?
Another thing – Google App Engine is free up to a certain quota, beyond that – you pay 2 play. With this amount of traffic, the WH is paying tax $$ to Google, unless they reached a special agreement. Guess every dollar counts now, when the government has to pay bonuses to the brilliant execs at AIG..
It should be evident — the demographics appear to be leaning towards students, regardless of age. And you ask how we have time to spend on polls? It only takes a few seconds to click a button.
Obama has been using a blackberry too and nobody talked about endorsement fee then… We should enjoy seeing a president being so high tech and willing to leverage web 2.0 technology.
The real story here is that top question only reflects who is using the most a tool like Google Moderator, which is most likely the people under 30. That raises a question: should debates of this importance rely solely on new technologies to receive feedbacks from the audience when they’re so many people who might not be comfortable with it but very willing to participate?
200K votes in 2 hours = ~30 TPS, hardly ‘highly scalable system’.
My thoughts exactly. A $10/month virtual hosting provider and what, a screenful of PHP code, and you could be similarly ‘highly scalable.’
Is this the pinnacle of what can be achieved with the Google AppEngine? This is going to be one long recession if so…
The popularity of people participating – now THAT I would agree with. Fantastic to get people participating and to introduce some level of transparent conversation, but really, come on, “highly scalable” my left foot.
How about some rapid evolution of actual DISCUSSION, rather than just voting up and down? Crank filtering? De-duplication of similar ideas? This is more a “noise engine” than it is a discussion/moderation engine.
should only stimulate those that are unemployed.
From campaign to election to presidency.. our first tech/social media president.. and we’re going to see a lot more along the way..
Google Moderator is finally being put to use. I think it is a great tool and I am glad to see that they will be using it to get a response back to the questions/suggestions posted on there. And I hope others feel like there is room for a Google competitor here because I was already in the process of developing a product like this when Moderator was released.
Surely is using the best tools for the trade to get his message across. Finally we have a president that believes in technology!
Does it mean that the website code is in the public domain?
http://www.whit....gov/copyright/
Lots of tech-savvy folks use Google products in various ways. It’s not a huge surprise to me that a tech-savvy White House does as well. And they have used a lot of other tech-savvy products (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr), not just Google.
Yea, I don’t get the endorsement sarcasm either. If anything, using a premaid plateform is cost effective and cost conscience. It’s smarter spending.. Any money saved at least means less public spending for this particular site.
Wow, I think the White House really really loves Google
I think they may have donated to the campaign, so the best way Obama can pay them back is by hawking their products.
the best way they can pay them back is by not getting them involved in an antitrust suit.
If there was anything that could get me hating my Prez, that would be it.
On the other hand, if his admin. ever goes after Google, I’ll love O even more.
Google’s adsense payout is a scam.
Did you notice that – although hosted on YouTube – this video plays WITHOUT the YouTube logo ?
http://www.whit...use.gov/Nowruz/
Who wants to be President and have the YouTube logo removed ?
Clicking on the video tells you that you’re about to go to YouTube. So yeah, a special player is being used.
I don’t for one think there is any foul play behind this. The White house is simply using what it believes are the best platforms to reach out to the community in new and innovative ways.
To the comment about these tools being used mainly by people under 30… it’s a good point but don’t forget that up until now, participative democracy methods like town halls and other public meetings favoured retirees, who often have a disproportionate representation in these events (simply because they have more time).
I think the web is fast becoming a trans-generations medium and these initiatives from the WH are only going to speed up that process.
Michael, as an expert in the matter, why don’t you suggest to the WH other, comparable services from Google’s competitors? It would indeed be nice to “spread the wealth around” (!) and have other companies benefit from the WH’s adoption of Web 2.0…
The corporate part.
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
This just smells like a troll post to me
I think it’s just that Katie Stanton, Director of Citizen Participation in Obama’s team was responsible for Google Moderator when she worked at Google.
http://www.ondo...-announced.html
One problem: One of the world’s most powerful, _unregulated_ monopolies has possession of government communications every time administration officials use Google docs and the like.
Another is the fact that the technology we see for ourselves is obviously branded as such. Such is usually not the case elsewhere. When Obama reads a speech from a TelePromTer, do we see their logo in the corner of the TV screen? Do we see a “Microsoft Word” watermark on government handouts or a PHP mark at the bottom of govt. Websites? Of course not.
Given that Google was one of the very largest contributors to Obama and the party alike, it’s hardly cynical or paranoid to raise the concerns that others have.
By using “most popular” as the default (and in fact the only) sorting mechanism for questions, Google Moderator — like so many other tools of its kind that have been used for similar projects in recent months — is heavily biased towards the early leaders (items that manage to reach the top 10 or top 20 shortly after the launch of a project). Since these items receive all the attention they tend to stay at the top. The later in the process a new question is submitted, the smaller the chances it will ever reach the top.
Depending on the circumstances, this might be considered unfair and not in line with public participation standards.
A proper “brainstorming” tool would probably break this process up into three phases:
1) Generate (collect all questions)
2) Clean-up (de-dupe, sort and group questions)
3) Select (have participants vote up the most popular ones without exposing any results while the voting is still ongoing)
Alas, since there aren’t any tools out there that can do that, Google Moderator along with its cousins is the best the team at WhiteHouse.gov can do — for now.
I’m pretty sure they’re aware of these issue. Note how they are continuously experimenting: First they introduced sub-categories (during the second installment of Open for Questions on Change.gov). This time around, they’ve cut short the time the tool will be active and also committed to Obama himself answering a few of the questions immediately after the forum closes on Thursday.
The vast majority of people couldn’t care less what technology is underpinning the whitehouse.gov site — they just care that they are being treated with respect and given the opportunity to be heard. And isn’t that what we’re hoping for from our government?
so will google now open source the Moderator code?
Given that only a few other companies can implement the scale of Google’s internet-supercomputer platform, maybe this is a realistic idea, and maybe it can give Google great brownie points since Microsoft is doing something in opensource (helping or subverting is another issue).
But Google does other smart and good things too.
Would love to see what they decide…
Maybe they could opensource the easy part of the code – that which does not reveal their platform’s “trade secrets”, so to speak.
also since Alex pointed out above somewhere in comments
http://www.whit....gov/copyright/
isn’t it the same as using ABC, NBC, etc? Now it’s GBC (Google Broadcasting Network)?
They ARE paying him a huge endorsement fee – it’s called “the freedom their children would have had”.