What and Why

CommunityCOUNTS is a labor of love and the product of my “free-time” over the past year. It started as an attempt to help nudge political discourse away from soundbites and towards substance. In its current form it helps spark, collect, rank and compel discussion around an assortment of web-content by leveraging a community’s voice. It can be used to run simple contests or something resembling a self-organizing petition/Q&A. What I find most exciting is our Q&A’s ability to compel meaningful replies. Our Q&A forums don’t rely only on communities to produce and choose questions. They ask visitors to evaluate the answers as well, focusing not on ideology but rather on completeness. Knowing this from the onset, respondents have good reason to properly answer questions. Of course, the quality of these forums depends in a large part upon their moderators. So please help us out, and start your own forum.

Hopes and Thanks

For the last six years I’ve been teaching high school physics and astronomy, and this year I will be attending law school. These endeavors, along with communityCOUNTS, reflect my desire to find that place where I can make the largest positive difference in the world, and with any luck communityCOUNTS will also help me avoid the choice between defaulting on my student loans or selling my soul to a faceless law firm. The site offers both free (ad supported) forums as well as a premium service, but please, feel free to send me any PayPal love you like. Not only do I have to pay for law school but my undergrad and a masters as well. However, it’s important to note that the entire platform is “free software,” as in freedom. That is, I’ve licensed it as open source, and the code is available here.

Of course, communityCOUNTS wouldn’t exist if not for the amazing collaborative enterprise that is the web. It’s easy to trick oneself into thinking he’s more clever than reality supports when there are such great shoulders to stand on. Much of this site is built on/with open source software, including Apache, Linux, mySQL, and the wonderfully clever twofer reCAPTCHA along with a slew of other great Perl Modules from CPAN. Forum moderators will recognize FCKeditor, and many of those snappy images at one point passed through GIMP. Flickr’s Creative Commons search was great for icon construction. The Sunlight Labs API made the election08 tool (no longer available) possible along with data from nationalatlas.gov, and Wikipedia factored in there too. Some users will see a Talkinator chat box along with their forums. Then there’s this page you’re reading, the product of a WordPress blog, and of course there’s many a thanks owed to Firebug.

I firmly believe CommunityCOUNTS would not exist at all if not for the following people: James Kotecki, Jamie Bernstein, Esther Brady, Josh Estelle, and Josh Levy. The current stature of the project owes much thanks to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, plus every 10questions participant, esp. the sponsors (see a full list).

The Long Version

In the fall of 2006 I took a Fulbright teacher exchange to Edinburgh, Scotland where I began using YouTube to help sustain an old lesson of mine. I soon found myself an active member of the community, even producing a modest video podcast–The Tabletop Explainer. So when YouTube announced its You Choose ‘08 Spotlight, I became one of its many participants. Many tubers were happy for the chance to interact with candidates, but given the conversational tone of the site and tubers’ propensity for long threaded discussion, we felt there was more to be done for the promotion of real dialogue. So I got an idea, “Why not have viewers vote on what videos they want addressed by the candidates?”

After building up interest and running vote tallies within comment threads, I created and launched CommunityCounts dot US with the help of fellow tubers James Kotecki, Jamie Bernstein, and Esther Brady. The site allowed people to vote on Spotlight video replies with the hope that candidates would listen to the very voters they were trying to win over. We explained our reasoning in a techPresident OpEd, Let the Two-Way Conversation Begin, and though we never quite reached critical mass, we gained some street cred and put a good idea out there, even adapting a portion of the site to aid in Congressman George Miller’s AskGeorge initiative. We even toyed with the idea of turning communityCOUNTS into a political blog, getting a contribution or two from fellow physics-guy turned politico Shelby Highsmith.

Shortly after launch, YouTube and CNN announced their plans for a Democratic debate, and once it became clear they didn’t intend to solicit viewer feedback on what questions to ask, re-purposing communityCOUNTS to vote on debate questions seemed a natural next step. This garnered a good amount of press attention, my favorite being an interview on NPR’s Day to Day.

The debate came and went, and still many in the online community felt there was more to do. Post-debate, I began talking with the people over at techPresident about what an ideal online forum would look like for the ‘08 presidential candidates. We wanted to know how best to use the web to improve the discourse. The result was 10questions, a co-creation of Andrew Rasiej, Micah Sifry and myself. The idea was simple. Let the people not only submit questions but also decide what questions should be asked. Don’t constrain responses with artificial time limits, and let the questioners weigh in on whether or not they got a true answer.

Parallel to this, the Republican debate started to look as if it might not happen due to a lack of candidate participation, and we put out a video urging the candidates to commit. Again, it featured myself, Kotecki (EmergencyCheese), Bernstein (Razela), and Brady (faintstarlite). However, it also included appearances from Tony (thewinekone), Highsmith (shelbinatorTV), and Alan (fallofautumndistro).

The great people over at techPresident, including Josh Levy and Anthony Russomano, pulled together a tremendous coalition of bloggers and e-communities to help launch 10questions. Over 40 sites both on the left and right of political webdom joined together to promote the idea that we the people should have a chance to ask the questions. We also partnered with The New York Times Editorial Board and MSNBC in approaching the candidates. Joanne Colan and the Rocktboom crew lent their talents in putting together a few videos, and we hit the ground running in mid October 2007.

We hadn’t counted on Iowa and New Hampshire choosing their candidates so early, and consequently ended up competing for voter and candidate attention in a crowded field. However, the questions submitted for the forum received a respectable 121,614 votes, and in the end, we got the participation of then top tier candidates including Mike Huckabee, John Edwards, and Barack Obama. The format worked, generating real answers from the candidates, and we began thinking about the future.

Eventually, I decided to take the communityCOUNTS platform, which was the backbone of 10questions, and turn it into what you see here today, and that as they say, is that.