I have noticed that there a group of sites that are using a rating system similar to Digg to find out what people want President Obama to do once he takes office. However, I have a few concerns and some suggestions to make your mission more successful.

I came to this realization while reading Alan Boyle’s article “Wired Whitehouse” that there are too many groups doing this with the plan of passing it on to the administration. Wouldn’t it be better to contact the administration and have these as one sister site to the transition site?

Using semantic web technologies and further collaboration and voting systems within issues, you could easily aggregate all these issues to make it more efficient. This will achieve a higher quality debate and achieve your goals in many ways.

First, it will allow issues to be combined quickly and easily. Semantic web technologies can summarize issues and pull them together into a summary, finding trends that could be broken down into multiple sub issues. For example, within an issue titled “End the Drug War” could be the sub issue “Legalize Marijuana.” This way visitors to the site will not be overwhelmed by the number of issues and can have a more nuanced debate about each one, picking and choosing what sub issues they agree with rather than having to hunt through so many.

Secondly, with all of you working together everyone online would take the formation of a citizen’s agenda more seriously because with more people you would have more influence. In addition, the constituency drawn to the site through other aggregated news pages would be enough for the transition team to consider making it a sister site, guaranteeing a more serious consideration by the transition team than if multiple smaller proposals (with redundant requests) were submitted. It saves the Obama Administration from having to do the aggregation.

I sincerely hope you will take this under advisement. All of you guys are providing a great service, but I want to make sure it is taken seriously by the administration. This would make it easier for that to happen.