It’s often said that people aren’t interested in politics. But we know that, when you address an issue that people care about, that generalisation simply isn’t true.
And there are few things that Britain cares more about than the NHS, as evidenced by the explosion of the #welovethenhs hashtag on Twitter a few months back.
So, when we published our draft manifesto on health last Monday, we knew there would be a lot of online activity. But we didn’t want to just publish the document – we wanted to start a conversation with people about exactly what they want from their National Health Service.
So we used Google Moderator, the same tool President Obama used in his “Open for Questions” initiative, to source questions for a live webcast in which David would take users’ questions.
The voting aspect of Moderator allowed us to open the process right up, so we weren’t just inviting users to submit questions – we were asking them to pick which ones would be answered.
We were told this was a risky approach (many of the popular questions from Obama’s event were focused on marijuana legislation) but we were struck by the high quality of questions and the huge number of votes placed on them – over 40,000 in just four days.
Is this proof that if you trust the people, you will get good results? We certainly think so, and it makes me think back to an argument made by the filmmaker Ivo Gormley about the Number 10 petitions site, which he said was filled with joke petitions simply because nobody actually believed their views would be taken seriously.
In this case, we were clear from the outset that David would be addressing the top questions – and we’d only intervene if questions were in some way offensive or not on the subject of the NHS – which we hardly had to do at all.
The webcast itself, which was broadcast from the King’s Fund in London, went off without a hitch – and we were even able to get some questions in from Twitter and the live chat that accompanied the event.
The other chapters of the draft manifesto will be published in the coming weeks, and we’re looking forward to holding similar events where the users will control the agenda. If you’d like to be kept up to date with this and other online initiatives, don’t forget to sign up to our e-mail newsletters.
Originally posted at http://blog.conservatives.com/index.php/2010/01/11/what-happens-when-you-let-users-control-the-agenda/
