10Questions' Election Innovations: Have You Talked to Your Candidate Today?

Business can't solve every problem. Not even social business. Those of us who live in democracies sometimes have to recognize the necessary messiness of building consensus and role up our hands to participate in electing people we think will best represent our interests. A new tool from the Personal Democracy Forum is designed to make it easier for us to get real answers about real questions from our candidates.

The 10Questions project is a platform that is meant to update the civic debate using the tools of the era. The project is a collaboration with Google and YouTube and is supported by funding from the Knight Foundation.

Basically the way it works is that, over the next week, citizens will be able to upload the questions that matter most to them in the context of specific election campaigns. Anyone can vote for or against certain questions. For example, I just voted up a question in the CA governor race about how the candidates would handle the likely possibility of legalized marijuana. Hey, I live in San Francisco...this is (legitimately) a local economic issue.

At the end of the voting period, the 10 questions that the community has decided are most important are presented to the candidates, who then respond point-by-point via video. The same community who voted on which questions to ask then can vote about whether or not the candidate actually answered the questions. This creates an extremely public review process in which candidates are being judged not only on the quality of their answer but on their instinct towards obfuscation or truth telling.

The project is not meant to be a cure-all to the challenges that face political participation in this country. It is not a solution for low voter turnout or the relentless money machine that drives the political calendar. What it is is an attempt to make the technology of the era work better for average citizens.

Indeed, what's most interesting in some ways to me is that fact that the project is driven not by some novel technology, but instead by a clever combination of interface and intent. The interface weaves together video with crowdsourced voting, and makes the whole thing effortless by allowing you to sign in with your Google ID. The intent, of course, is where the real power lies, and the idea of getting direct responses to your pressing questions is what the Personal Democracy Forum is betting with bring people to the site.

The tool is a reminder that the point of communication technology tends to be more about amplifying the opportunity for real dialogue than it is about upending it. 10Questions is, if anything, a return to a stalwart element of Town Hall democracy that has been easy to lose in the television era.

Voting is open until Thursday. Check it out at 10Questions.com.

Photo credit: Screenshot from 10Questions.