"Listening to America was created specifically to enable people to self-organize and be self-empowered in communicating their priorities and passions for the direction of our country, " Yaki said.
Notes and suggestions from the meeting were compiled in a 1,200 report spreadsheet. As director of the platform committee, Yaki felt compelled to read through at least some of the unwieldy document. But, to his surprise, he said he found he couldn't stop reading.
"I became obsessed," Yaki said. He and other committee members were impressed by both the participants' enthusiasm and precision.
"Everyone involved in the campaign who attended a platform meeting was struck by how the attendees were serious and focused," Yaki said. "In fact, we were struck by how many meeting reports ended with 'this is a great idea, and we need to do this more often than every four years.'"
Yaki said that the contributions that people made through the public meetings had a significant impact on the final platform wording. Yaki credited the participants for inspiring them to write the platform in a more "action-oriented" tone and said that the meetings helped them suss out which issues were most important to Americans.
"We all got the sense from attending meetings and reading the meeting reports that people were frustrated by the economy, by $5 dollar a gallon gas, by the subprime crisis and credit crunch, worried about their jobs and health care for their families -- they wanted results, and they wanted them now," Yaki said. "Our platform incorporated that sense of urgency into the dynamic, proposal-driven document that we have today."
While the project was praised by some as a good first step toward political transparency, others believed it could have gone even further by engaging a larger number of people in a more accessible and efficient manner. Among those voices was a trio of young Internet entrepreneurs, who have long been inspired by the Internet's potential for opening up the political process.
Cornell grads and good friends, Dan Scanfeld, Vanessa Scanfeld and David Stern are the founders of MixedInk, an online collaborative writing tool aimed at synthesizing the opinions of a large group in a democratic and user-friendly way. Contributors on MixedInk write, edit, revise and rate texts on a scale to 1 to 10. The final product is the highest-rated piece of text, a document that fairly reflects the groups' shared point of view.
