Case Summary

The White House Office of New Media launched Open for Questions on Whitehouse.gov to engage Americans from around the country on the economy. For two days, citizens were encouraged to submit questions at Whitehouse.gov via text or video, as well as to rate questions submitted by others. After 100,000 questions and 3.6 million ratings in less than 48 hours, President Obama responded to several of the top questions via an online town hall held at the White House and streamed live on Whitehouse.gov.

Business Challenge

On March 24-26, 2009 Whitehouse.gov launched the initial run of Open for Questions, followed by an online town hall with the President on March 26th.

The trial run of Open for Questions was a new experiment for Whitehouse.gov, adding to the President's efforts to open up the White House and give Americans from around the country a direct line to the Administration. The goal was to open up the White House to the people so they can understand what government is doing to get the economy back on track, and have a chance to participate. The public was encouraged to ask the President exactly what they wanted to know about the economy.

A secondary goal was to sponsor a project that allowed the public and the government to experience firsthand the potential of new media in communicating with the White House.

To do so, we used a whitehouse.gov single sign-on solution, developed in-house, that works with third party services, in this case to Google's authentication system through open-source Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In addition, we created a way for people to submit questions without creating an account through an alternative form.

Approach Taken

The principles used in designing Open for Questions were:

• Simplicity, allowing anyone to participate
• Well defined participation guidelines
• Clear expectations of what would happen with public's questions
• Allow the community to moderate themselves

In making technical choices, we looked for tools that were free or inexpensive, simple to use, and provided ability for the community to help categorize and monitor since we expected a great volume of substantial public input. We chose Google Moderator, a tool that allows anyone coming to the website to submit and rank questions. While the technology was built on a third party platform, Whitehouse.gov retained ownership and access to the data.

The call to action started with a video by the President on the Whitehouse.gov blog inviting the public to ask questions about the economy. The call to action on Whitehouse.gov:

The White House is open for questions.

We invite you to participate in our community-moderated online town hall. Submit your own question about the economy and rate submissions from others. We also encourage you to include a link to a video of yourself asking your question (ideally 30 seconds or less), but text submissions are all you need. Come back on Thursday to watch the President answer some of the most popular submissions live at WhiteHouse.gov.

The public found simple instructions to start voting on questions or submitting their own, including the ability to submit a published video of the question being asked.

To better organize the information, Whitehouse.gov encouraged the public to search for a specific question before submitting one that already existed. Whitehouse.gov also created topics within the broad category of "economy." Topics included: education, home ownership, health care reform, veterans, small business, auto industry, retirement security, green jobs and energy, financial stability, jobs, and budget. If a citizen submitted a new question, they would pick a topic from among these choices.

All questions could be viewed by all. To keep the questions focused on the public's most important topics, participants were able to both suggest questions and rate (up or down) others' questions. The most popular questions rose to the top. Participants were asked to flag inappropriate questions.

The President answered the top text questions and a couple popular video questions from many of the categories during an online town hall, and also answered live questions from the live audience. Other members of the Administration addressed more of the questions after the event, such as this video Q&A about employment and health options for people with disabilities and additional answers by the Vice President's Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor.

White House Counsel helped on policy and legal issues, including creating the Terms of Participation which addressed inappropriate and off-topic questions.

Results Achieved

Over a period of less than 48 hours, 92,927 people submitted 104,127 questions and cast 3,606,825 ratings (average of 38 ratings per participant). All questions can be viewed online. In addition there were 1 million visits and 1.4 million views of the Open for Question page.

The high level of public participation in such a short timeframe shows the importance and enthusiasm among citizens for a public discussion and the potential for our online programs to tap into this.

Open for Questions greatly expanded the range of people who could participate. People from every state participated, as shown by the map below. The questions submitted by video (<1% of submissions) were compelling, creating even more of a personal connection with the person(s) asking the question.

For example, three students from Kent State University in Ohio created a video asking President Obama a question on paying for college. The video was shown and answered by the President at the White House, online at Whitehouse.gov and across national TV and other media networks.

The President and policy makers got a better sense of what's on people's minds during these tough economic times. The exercise generated a wealth of questions which can be used in the future, as evidenced by others in the Administration answering additional questions in the weeks following the online town hall.

While Open for Questions enjoyed a lot of attention - such as the number of people and questions - there was also a feel of excitement about doing something that had never been done before.

Lessons Learned

This experiment provided new perspectives on both the advantages and potential issues for implementing new media strategies at the White House and in the government in order to open up government to the people and allow them to participate.

Some of the factors leading to success included:

• Buy in from the top
• Staying focused on the goal and working through impediments
• Bringing in outside innovation where needed
• Keeping the project simple
• Clear concept to the public of what we were trying to do, with well defined participation guidelines and the expectation of what would happen with the publics questions
• Something new and exciting which engaged the public
• Allowing the community to mostly moderate themselves

Issues we are reviewing include:

• Types of questions that were flagged by the community
• Different types of participation among individuals and organized groups of advocates
• How community might inform participants as well as questions, perhaps using reputation management software
• Better ways to moderate through technology and through the community
• Further review and improvement of the underlying technology design
• How to build in deeper discussions on more specific and complex issues
• How to lower barriers to participation, including video submission
• What additional metrics should be used to measure success
• Additional promotion efforts - with a comprehensive approach that includes blogs, television, online partners, email, etc.
• How to partner with others to best use internal resources and reach the most people
• How to build templates to make this easier in future, not only at the White House but where it makes sense across government
• Where does this fit with mission across government; where, when and how should it be used when and with whom