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.
( 6 comments ) Tags: Google Moderator, internet, nhs, webcasts
Pingback by What happens when you let users control the agenda? « Craig Elder on January 11, 2010 at 12:58 pm
[...] Originally posted at http://blog.conservatives.com/index.php/2010/01/11/what-happens-when-you-let-users-control-the-agend... [...]
Comment by Colm Howard-Lloyd on January 11, 2010 at 3:58 pm
This was a great application of assisted moderation – ie letting users decide what questions should be put – so congratulations.
The lessons you taught me were:
* When eliciting questions on a single subject (in this instance The NHS), Google Moderator needs some more work on its “a similar question has already been asked” as it wasn’t able to differentiate between substantially different questions.
* Google Moderator takes up a lot of screen real estate, when embedding there is a need to minimize other content above and around.
I look forward to further use of this style of group conversation…
Comment by Joanna on January 11, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Choosing the questions was a good idea, but it seemed to me that the questions that were added first became the ones that had the majority of votes. This was unfair to people who added questions near the end. They stood no chance of getting their question voted for. If this is done again then the cut off date for asking questions should be a few days before and voters should then be subject to this questions randomly so that later additions didn’t lose out. another way to do this would be for the questions to be added over the first few days and then voting would take place over a further two or three days.
Comment by M Tasker on January 11, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Will it be DC doing all the webcasts?? Unlike USA where you vote for a person In this country you vote for a party. Shouldn’t we see some of the other team members answering questions or has it become the David Cameron party??
Comment by Craig Elder on January 12, 2010 at 11:50 am
M Tasker – thanks for your comment.
You’re right that other team members should be involved, and that’s why Andrew Lansley attended the event on Friday and answered a good number of the questions after an initial response from David.
We’ll be adopting a similar approach for future webcasts.
Comment by Nigel on March 16, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Ways raise money.
Why to we not increase the costs of fines ?
Why bring back the dog licence maybe at cost of £300
per year ?
Why not bring in a licence for boats and yachts ?
Why not bring in a licence for fox hunting ?
Why not bring back gambling tax ?