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If you could ask the candidates 10Questions, what would they be?

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!

The 10Questions Presidential Forum is being produced by techPresident in cooperation with The New York Times editorial board, with support from MSNBC.com and sponsorship from a large, cross-partisan group of bloggers, online media and organizations. (For a full list, go to our Sponsors page.) Participation as a co-sponsor of 10Questions in no way implies that either techPresident, The New York Times or MSNBC.com endorses any of their activities or writings; nor does it imply their endorsement of our activities or writings, or those of other co-sponsors either. We all agree about one thing: It's time for a people-powered approach to presidential forums, that puts you in the driver's seat.

I am incredibly excited about this project for a whole variety of reasons. First, look at the amazing list of blogs I helped put together to sponsor this event :

Afro-Netizen
Air America
AirCongress
BlackProf
Blip.tv
BlogHer
Buzzmachine
Care2
ColorofChange
Crooks&Liars
CultureKitchen
DailyKos
E-Democracy.org
FireDogLake
Free Press Action Fund
HotAir
Huffington Post
Hugh Hewitt
Instapundit
Latino Pundit
Media Bloggers Assoc.
Michelle Malkin
MSNBC
MyDD
New York Observer
Open Left
Page One Q
Pajamas Media
Pam's House Blend
Patrick Ruffini
Politico
Politics Online
PoliticsTV.com
PrezVid
Racialicious
RawStory
RedState
RightMarch
RightWingNews
Rocketboom
SmartMobs
Smirking Chimp
TalkingPointsMemo
techRepublican
The New Homemaker
The Truth Laid Bear
Townhall
Treehugger
VivirLatino

Yep. We've got BlogHer, Vivir Latino, Black Profs, Page One Q, Pam's House Blend. Even Sepia Mutiny's desis are in the houze. I'm proud to have helped to bring together this amazingly diverse group of blogs for this project.

Now here's the fun part. We've got until the beginning of December to submit, promote and vote for your questions and mine. I'm going to do a few events in New York City to get non-bloggers to participate.

So, what kind of event would you like us to host?

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Nobody needs to be told how to use the lounge chair. "Users" of any age, background, or degree of sophistication can immediately comprehend it: take it in, in almost all of its details, at a single glance. It is self-revealing to the point of transparency, and the same can be said of most domestic furniture: you lie on a bed, put books and DVDs and tchotchkes on shelves, laptops and flowers and dinner on tables. Did anyone ever have to tell you this?

The same cannot be said of the iPod - which, remember, is one of the best-thought-out and comparatively simple digital artifacts ever developed, demonstrating market-leading insight into users and what they want to do with the things they buy. Take off your power user hat, try to imagine life without the chops you've earned over the course of your involvement with these complex artifacts, and you'll see that to people encountering an iPod for the first time it's not obvious what it does, or how to get it to do that. It may not even be obvious how to turn the thing on.

You don't have to configure the chair, or set preferences. You needn't worry about compatible file formats. You can take it out of one room or house and drop it into another, and it still works exactly the same way as it did before, with no adjustment. It never reminds you that a new version of its firmware is available, and that certain of its features will not be available until you do choose to upgrade. As much as I love the iPod, none of this can be said for it.

— Adam Greenfield
v-2 Organisation | interface usability | The dumb furniture manifesto