As Jon Stewart said, its like having a bike under the x-mas tree. We know its a bike, we want the bike but we have to wait until x-mas. Just give us the dam bike already.
Whether this works or not is one thing, but the main point is that they are trying new way to reach out to America and get them more involved, and to make government more transparent. The mind set of the incoming administration is a complete 180 compared to the current administration.

This sounds great. It's like having a direct line to the Presidency.

Anyone have any idea how you would ask a current administration member a question? Or any in the past for that matter.

Indeed fulfilling Lincoln's creed; of the people, by the people, for the people.

It must be wildly busy right now--I tried to sign in and got an error message. Shows the power of TPM. :-)

"The rub, though, is this: The public is able to vote on how much they'd like certain queries to be a priority, and the voting tally is visible -- which means it'll be tougher for the Obama team to not answer questions that participants clearly want answered."

Well, youngsters, that's what we call Accountability! How novel that concept seems, thanks to the current bunch of thugs who think we only deserve an "accountability moment" every 4 years!

Like Tena, I simply grow more pleased with our president elect with each passing day. I think that this is a great idea (and an undeniable improvement over what we have now). Meanwhile, I look forward to reading with amusment the "questions" that they will be cooking up over at RedState and No Quarter.

FYI, the app running on change.gov is an instance of Google Moderator (http://moderator.appspot.com/).

My former employer did something like this.

They had one that was internal for employees and one that was external for customers.

It proved very hard to ignore and a vocal minority was able to push for changes that would otherwise not have been made. This is really a great idea for government.

How terrifying for Republicans that there is a competent Democrat who is going to show the American public that government can work on the national level. Eventually people will realize that if it can work nationally it can work locally, too, and then the jig might be up for anti-government conservatism.

also growing larger each day is "your seat at the table" with pdf submissions, including a welcome for you to submit yours...amen to those who have them, from one who reads them.

Long-timer lurker. I wanted to sign up at change.gov so I could get in on all this accountability stuff, but unfortunately the site is not secure. Not a big deal (my trust level in the transition team is quite high), but we IT types spend a lot of time telling people not to supply any personal information or passwords on sites that don't have "the little lock" or "https" in the URL. I'm surprised the webmaster of change.gov is letting passwords get sent unencrypted over the internet. Sent her/him an e-mail asking for an SSL encryption upgrade.

Anyway, if you signed up using a password that you use in other places, you might want to go change it (close the barn door firmly after the horses are out).

I'm going to go read what people are asking. Can't wait for the first answer.

That site is already being spammed by the hateful anti-choice freaks. You will notice the exact same anti-choice question appears numerous times, but with different people submitting it.