Jim Moore and I have been talking to the Dean campaign about using our H2O software to facilitate policy discussions among its members. Jim’s observation of the Dean blog commenting system is that it is more akin to chat than to substantive discussions — the overwhelming feeling one gets from reading the posts is that people are mostly jazzed about being in the presence of like minded people rather than about participating in thought provoking discussion. Perhaps more importantly, free-for-all discussion of the type practiced in blog comments and most other online discussion systems simply can’t scale past a few thousand people (and arguable not up to that). It simply becomes impossible for each participant to track anything but a small fraction of the conversation when that many people are involved.
We think that H2O Rotisserie discussions could sovle both of these problems. First, the timing structure that the Rotisserie adds to discussions slows them down enough to give people time to write thoughtfully and concentrate on the substance of the response rather than on simpy posting something quickly to be a part of the crowd. Second, the way that the Rotisserie structures the flow of the discussions — who responds to whom — facilitates the exposure of a much wider vareity of voices and allows unlimited number of people of participate in a single discussion by breaking the discussion up into lots of smaller discussions between individuals, while still allowing conversation within the group as a whole.
We have interested some folks at the Dean campaign enough in our software to get them to pose a question to our existing H2O participants (click here to participate). Hopefully this collaboration will lead to more interesting uses of H2O within the campaign.
We are of course interested in getting H2O as widely used as possible. We are focusing on the Dean campaign becuase 1) we happen to have contacts there, 2) they are the most technically adventurous and therefore the most likely to experiment with new software, and 3) where Dean goes on the Internet, the other campaigns follow. We’d love to see all campaigns using H2O to facilitate thoughtful discussions among their supporters (or detractors!).