Heads up: Blog post, email and survey coming soon. Comments?
Micah Sifry
We're getting close to 20,000 signatures and coming up on our two week anniversary tomorrow. The steering committee has been mulling various next steps for Demand Question Time, including getting some top politicians to endorse the call, organizing a "Call Your Congressman" day to find out how many Members support Question Time, organizing a live streaming "web-in" with top endorsers talking about why QT is needed, and organizing a national "Talk Across the Aisle" day where we'd enable people to connect by phone with someone from their state of the opposite party and then jointly call their Senators to press for QT.
But before we do any of those things, we thought it best to try engaging the petition signers first to a) find out a bit more about who they are by getting them to take a short survey (more on that below), and b) get more of a public conversation going on DemandQuestionTime.com about who is supporting this and getting their ideas about what to do next. So....
Tomorrow, we're aiming to post a blog post and email out a short message to the list. Text below. Please chime in now if you have any comments/suggestions.
I'm writing also to get your input on what we should ask for in the survey. The main reason to do this is to get a sense of how diverse we actually are. So, information like: age, gender, state, political party, political label. I don't want to make this a big survey, but if you have ideas about useful information that we should ask for, chime in now (keep in mind that we'll be lucky to get 1000 responses).
Micah
Draft blog post:
Welcome to the Demand Question Time blog.
Two weeks ago, we watched as President Obama and the Republican members of the House of Representatives engaged in a frank and respectful question-and-answer session, unmoderated and live on television. It was a moment of constructive civility and substantial debate at a time when the national conversation often seems to consist of politicians and pundits talking past each other or sloganeering. And so we started the Demand Question Time petition a few days later, determined to push both sides to make this a regular tradition.
To our amazement, nearly 20,000 people have signed up already. We’ve never seen such a diverse coalition: Respected leaders from the right to the left, activists from the Tea Party movement to the anti-Iraq War movement, campaign strategists for the Democrats and the Republicans, and many leading journalists, bloggers, academics and regular folks have joined the Demand Question Time call. Judging from all the <a href="http://demandquestiontime.com/press-coverage/">press</a> we’ve earned, we’ve started a lively and important national conversation.
We’re working on a range of steps that we can take together to build support for Question Time, and plan to roll those out soon. The first step is this: we’re asking you to help us figure out how we build this effort. Use the comment thread below to introduce yourself, say a bit about why you signed the petition, and offer your thoughts on how to grow the movement. We’ll be listening! In the meantime, spread the word and share your ideas.
Micah Sifry, Mike Moffo, David Corn, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke, Glenn Reynolds
Steering committee, Demand Question Time
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Draft email:
It’s amazing. When was the last time Democrats, Republicans, independents, Greens, Tea Partyers, conservatives, progressives, liberals and libertarians came together so quickly about something involving politics? Believe it or not, 20,000 people—including you—have signed onto our “Demand Question Time” petition in the two weeks since we first posted it online.
We’ve struck a nerve, and started a national conversation on how we can improve the dialogue in Washington. Indeed, Demand Question Time has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, The Weekly Standard, Huffington Post, Politico and many blogs.
We want to build this movement, and need your help. Here are two easy things you can do to pitch in.
1. Take a brief, confidential survey [LINK] and tell us a bit about who you are and why you support Question Time.
2. Go to the DemandQuestionTime.com blog [LINK TO ABOVE POST] and join in the conversation there about the next steps we should take.
We think something very important happened two weeks ago, when President Obama and the Republican members of the House of Representatives talked to each other face-to-face, live and unfiltered on television. Both sides were called to be their best selves, and for once there was a real dialogue about our nation’s future. Let’s make that a regular event.
Sincerely,
Micah Sifry, Mike Moffo, David Corn, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke, Glenn Reynolds
Steering committee, Demand Question Time
P.S. If you have your own website or blog, post a link to the petition, or even better, just cut and paste this code [LINK TO THE EMBED CODE] to post it on your site.
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http://www.techpresident.com
http://micah.sifry.com
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Ari Melber
1. Would be interesting to know whether people are backing this because they think it's "good for democracy" or good for partisan reasons - like it's a way for Obama or the GOP to excel in this format. Whether or not you choose to publicize the response, it would be interesting to see what people's self-assessment is on their motivation for backing the plan.
2. Mobilizing targeted campaigns to get more members on the record for the idea seems like one of the best ways to both tangibly advance the idea and give additional news hooks and momentum to the project. It is research and pressure at once, if there is a critical mass of supporters to pull it off.
Ari Melber
Ari Melber
917-363-5213
Micah Sifry
Are you registered to vote?
Did you vote in the 2008 election?
Are you planning to vote in 2010?
And maybe some questions aimed at how politically active respondents are, such as:
Have you ever run for or served in elected office?
Have you contributed money to candidates or causes in the last year?
Perhaps that's too much...I'd like to keep this fairly simple.
Micah Sifry
take a look at let me know if there's anything you would change.
