Presidential Forum

What if you could ask any question to the presidential candidates? What if the candidates could answer at any time before the primaries with the caveat that you could mark their answer a WIN or FAIL?

This is what 10Questions.com is all about.

This is a project brought by the fine people behind Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry have gathered an amazing a non-partisan brain trust of technopundits and geeky wonks for their politics and technology shing ding. Amazing people like Morra Aarons, Zephyr Teachout, Patrick Ruffini, David All, Spencer Overton, Ruby Sinreich, Michael Bassik are part of the gang. Am an occassional bomb thrower there as well.

Out of the group's conversations came out the idea of 10Questions.com, an experiment we believe is the first one in people-powered online democracy :

Unlike television debates, the 10Questions Presidential Forum makes full use of the web's potential to expand participation in politics. Everyone has an opportunity to ask a question, and to rally support for their question being in the top ten. The candidates have plenty of time to formulate their answers, and can post in-depth replies. Finally, the community will be able to grade the candidates' answers. With large numbers of people participating, the candidates will have an incentive to pay attention. Who knows, maybe we'll even change the course of the election!