What a good online candidate-matrix should do
I posted the following comment to my Oct. 25 vent-a-thon against the Chamber’s $45-admission mayoral-candidates meeting, and realized that it has enough substance to be a blog post:
To the Chamber’s credit, their municipal election site for candidates (questions, with candidates posting their answers) is quite good and informative.
It goes some way toward satisfying Davin‘s request for an online candidate-matrix.
The problem I see with this format is that it’s difficult to compare candidates — each one is on a separate page, and voters/ citizens have to wade through an awful lot of pages, clicking between tabs to get close to comparing candidates’ stances.
It would be cool if users (of the site) had the option to click on a question (eg., “Do you believe the region has sufficient protective services? Please explain your answer”) and by doing so call up all the responses to date (some candidates are so unserious that they don’t bother responding to these surveys at all), with names of candidates appended (which would give users information on who has bothered to respond: another criterium for voters as to whether we should take the candidate seriously).
An additional feature I’d like is then, as a user of the site, to be able to “score” each candidate, so I can keep track of how they do (for me) on each question.
At the end, I could then print out a score card.
Matrix!, dudes and dudettes… This would be useful — fun, too. Might get more people engaged in local politics.
It’s the first time that “scoring” made sense for me in a vivid sort of way. I can really see the point of a built-in score card functionality now, though.
And like I said, I could see how a scoring functionality could grab voter attention, especially the attention of younger / alienated voters. Apply some gaming strategies to the process, get those brain juices revved up. All in a smart, awesome, and kick-ass way, of course… 😉
Great idea Yule. I would love to see something like this.. seems ripe for Monday Magazine to do something to this effect, no?
Comment by davin — October 27, 2008 #