Ideas

I just wanted to add a comment to expand on my motivation. I'm currently involved in two startups in addition to my day job, so this is not my "big idea" that will get a lot of my attention. However, I can produce the code in a few spare hours. I could probably use the help of one good designer to do a pretty look and feel and a crowd of people willing to populate the database in return for a share of the ad revenue. Obviously this is a limited-time idea since it would become a lot less interesting after November, but it could attract an audience and do some good in the meantime.

Done, for example http://www.vajoe.com...date_calculator.html

natmaka, I've seen a lot of that type of quiz that try to match your position to a candidate. That's not really what I want to do. I want to display candidate quotes and position statements and have the user guess which candidate made the statement. This makes a more interesting game format, and it also provides a better overview of all the candidates.

Every once in a while I see a quote I agree with made by some candidate I think I'm opposed to. I also see statements I'm really opposed to made by candidates I like. These really make me think and re-evaluate. I'm aiming for a game that leads to those "I didn't know that" moments.

Micco, the idea is nice but you have to be very carefull not to have statements taken out of their context otherwise you mislead people or bias them.
But I like the approach.
Tommy

Oh, OK! Thanks for clearing it up in my mind.

Not bad!

Reminds me of http://www.cambrianh...er/ideas-id/SPOlMMr/

Absolutely agreed vanhees. I think the moderation step and the requirement for including citation to a page where the quote appeared in context could help out with that.

As long as you can get unedited comments from the candidates, i.e. not filtered through the media, this could be an interesting site for political aficionados.

I'm not interested in pushing any particular candidate at this point because I'm still studying them all. I think voter ignorance and the way we let the media manipulate opinion is a huge problem, and education is the answer.

can they lead sounds good,but i would like to see it more along the lines of who's in control ?
like you say the media controls it all,but again who controls them and the media ? thats the serious isiue regards education.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

You might be able to offer this beyond the presidential elections as well. Why not have the ability to see what your governor, senator, mayor, sheriff etc are up to? Where do they stand on the issues?

PeeJayEl, I agree that it would be interesting to apply to all officials. If it proves popular, it would certainly be worthwhile keeping around after November and turning into something that monitored all types of elected officials. In addition to your idea about other offices, I also thought it would be interesting to show just the current week or so of quotes to make it a fun way to keep up with who was saying what.

FYI, a prototype of the site is online. The code is still fairly rough and there may be bugs, but I'm tinkering with it. It includes the ability for people to sign up and contribute as well as the code for admin-level moderation.

http://www.cantheylead.com/

I also thought about suggesting that you expand the site to include other countries. It would be interesting to see the differences or similarities among different countries/cultures and their comments and reactions to the political process in their own countries.

PeeJayEl, another great suggestion. We'll see how this first experiment with crowdsourcing works out. If people can be convinced to contribute and we can make the ad revenue to reward them, expansion would be the obvious course.

I like it. it is engaging. One potential problem: what happens in the event of flip-floppers? :)

i like the idea
local stuff is too limiting
i would go international and look at national elections in other countries as opposed to sheriffs?

I'll ask the famous Micco question. :-)

"What do you want from the community?"

This site is already up and running.

The whole enterprise is based on the assumption that the average voter cares.

GroundLoad: I laid out what I want from the crowd in the main idea.

I need the crowd to build the question database. I need a crowd to sign up and submit new quotes from candidate speeches, etc. so I have enough quotes to make the game fun and interesting. It's a wikipedia-type crowd participation; I don't need you to build the site, just to build the content. And get paid for it! (note the revenue sharing laid out on the contribution page).

The idea is nice and i am all for educating people to not blindly follow the leader in the BS we call politics.

As you admit this as it currently stands has a short time to live but if you do create big traffic then it would be a shame to waste it when the November comes and go.

I think a bigger issue than education is political accountability... did the elected officials follow through with their promises or were they the usual lies to get elected.

So my suggestion to give your site an ongoing life is to add an additional game of accountability to the site. You will be building a database of electoral promises for this election, what about building an additional db of past electoral promises and do a recognition question like you have here and additionally ask the question "Did they deliver?"

This database going forward could then become a measure of accountability for future elections where you could give the politicians a "Truth Index" as a 'believability' measure for their next electoral process, that could be very interesting and also give your site longevity.

Perhaps, you should look at putting up prizes to attract more players, either through sponsorship or a game play registration... a low entry fee e.g. $1 registration, where all the money is put into the prize pot, might attract a lot more player interest.

Looks like a good idea for a content site that will attract readers / viewers.

Good luck ;-)

There are all ready programs like this. Except maybe not in the game format. But, if you are a voter I hope your attention span is not like that.

agrees with Doymarn

Micco,
I checked out the site and changed my vote.
I think your concept is really nice.
Tommy

there are some options like this out there
why will people go to this and come back versus the competition?

Maybe this we should use this idea as a pre-requisite to voting. You have to know something about the issues and candidates before casting a vote.

Trivia games are very common, and the narrowing of this to a candidate trivia game is probably a good marketing exercise (both in terms of finding an audience for the game, and asking people to populate the database). I'd keep in mind there's no reason it can't be expanded to other topics.

You've built something good for 1 player... obviously the same db could drive head-to-head competition. I don't know how to make this more compelling than other trivia sites... but the crowdsourceable nature of the DB contents and the fact you've got it online makes it pretty sweet.

http://www.cantheyle....com/crowd/login.php
...i got a page-not-found error (so ya know). I don't have any quotes to contribute, just was checking it out. Is cool though in its current form probably identical to other trivia quote sites. But is awesome in that it is functional, and people can either play or contribute (once the login page is fixed) and you've got yourself a working site that can only get better.

I'd focus on either a Flash or DHTML version which pits people head-to-head.

Also, by filtering the questions (say a URL parameter), people wishing to direct people to only say Hillary quotes (or first quote from Hillary) can use your site for slightly manipulative purposes.

For example... quotes that no one agrees with... by Hillary. By having a URL parameter allowing that, someone who dislikes Hillary would direct people to your itself-neutral site and still get the initial type of question that they want.

Reminds me of when I saw an ad for a non-political product (like Absinthe) which said "4 more years", and implied the booze would make it easier to cope.

Of course it was just booze, so they could have had an equally disparaging ad campaign painting kerry as a dick. "Tired of listening of him talk so damn slowly?" probably would have worked.

I know you have higher goals with this... I'm just brainstorming on how you could build something as versatile as possible that max # of people will use it or link to it.

And... looks like i don't know much about US candidates after trying to identify a few quotes. McCain said "Bomb Iran... bomb bomb Iran". I remember THAT quote. Hard to forget THAT quote.

in 2006 there was a site in canada called http://www.whackthepm.com you hit the leader of each party that you least agree with.
Just something to look at.

also how are you going to make this website popular in the off election season?

Gordon, thanks for the heads up. The login link in the footer nav was correct, but the one in the text of the contribute page was not. It's fixed.

I'm not sure I understand about people using the site for manipulative purposes. Are you saying people could do this by filling the database with quotes that paint certain candidates in a bad light? I intend to combat that with moderation that tries to maintain a balance. Or do you mean I should add this as a feature, letting people bookmark certain quotes?

Brenden, thanks for the comment. I'll check out that site. As for the future, I don't have a firm plan to keep it popular after November. As I said in my first comment, this may just be a limited-time thing. But I was thinking (and other commenters have suggested) that it could continue and expand to cover more of government, other countries, non-government, etc. It could ultimately be kept up to date with ongoing news as a game-based way to review current events. For now, I'm just seeing whether crowdsourcing could be a viable way to power something like this.

Hey Micco I see you fixed it. I tried adding a quote and it seems to work ok-fine. I'll PM you and try line up a Skype call Wed so we can discuss in more detail this concept.

I definitely agree that tracking "did they deliver" would be more important to me, personally, especially as that being in Canada, we don't have term limits and someone could stay in power for decades.

However, the trivia presentation is a far more interesting than just reading bland (and often repetitive) political statements. The last election proganda I read was virtually indistinguishable between parties, so anything that highlights the differences in an interesting way is a good thing. I think this could also be popular with schools that have current events classes.

maybe focus on the next generation of voters... vs. today's voters, i.e. use this as a tool in high school to generate knowledge around the voting process and their future voting impact. not sure if this is done already...

Micco~ "Are you saying people could do this by filling the database with quotes that paint certain candidates in a bad light? I intend to combat that with moderation that tries to maintain a balance. Or do you mean I should add this as a feature, letting people bookmark certain quotes?"

No I don't mean combat quote stacking with moderation because you can always present the quotes in an equalized manner by randomly picking a candidate, THEN randomly picking a quote, instead of just randomly picking a quote (which would make people with more quotes more popular).

I mean a form of bookmarking certain quotes, so a URL will call them up. The web is crazy partisan, and the best way to pull traffic to this is by allowing partisans to use it for partisan purposes, at least for the first question posed. Then after that first question it can be random.

I'm not saying that's enough to cause PowerLine and DailyKos type users to link to CanTheyLead, but its an approach you should consider as it helps your Page Rank and traffic.

I also just checked out...
http://www.youdontknowjack.com/
...and was surprised to find the online game appears to be single player (it was multiplayer as a CD-ROM based game years ago). It is still a good example of how to present questions in an entertaining fashion. Obviously there is a lot of production overhead around each question asked. But I'd still play a game to see if there's mechanisms by which multiple choice can be presented which are fun yet easy to implement.

I asked JellyVision, the creators of You Don't Know Jack (YDKJ) if I was overlooking a multiplayer option on their online version of their game. Here's the response I got...

Yes, on the PC YDKJ was a multiplayer game. But unfortunately, we don't currently have the resources to make the online game multiplayer. So for the time being, you'll just have to play single player and prove to yourself how much smarter you are than yourself. Nice!

...Micco, if you ever get serious about a multi-player version of Can They Lead, it may be YDKJ has an engine which could be extended to support that. Maybe the cost of licensing it (for rebranding purposes) could be the construction of multiplayer support. That's pretty far-fetched, but if you're ever keen on multi-player it might be a win-win.

http://www.joecartoon.com/blenderpoll

Interesting site but I don't know how broad the appeal is.

Thanks for the comments Gord. I'll carve out some time to add the linking to a specific quote. I think that's a great idea for promotion.

Great idea. If you added individual scoring capability and some views showing how well the general public scores you'd have a fun and educational site. This isn't necessarily a limited time idea either: you could have "topics of the week" or month that relate to important events.

ChrisJ, I definitely want to add an overall scoring stat as soon as we have enough relevant user data. I think it would be very interesting to see stats on each question about how many people accurately identified the candidate and how many agreed with the statement. Even the campaigns might be interested in that data to see how well they're differentiating their candidate.

Gord, I added a way to link to a specific quote. When the answer displays, it includes a URL at the bottom that will load that quote instead of a random one so you can send a specific quote to someone else.

i think this idea has some good potential. what areas do you yourself specify in?

Thanks for the comment kairaspo. The code is done and the site is up and I've got a fair number of quotes in the rotation. I've gotten some good feedback and some discussion of changes/additional features from people outside CH, and I'm looking at alternatives to make it more game-like.

The crowdsourcing part of the website is open, so anyone who wants to contribute to the effort of adding new quotes to the game.

Right now, I really need some ways to generate traffic without spending a lot of money advertising the site. I'm open to any suggestions anyone has about look and feel (which is quite rudimentary now) or additional features, but I'd really like to see if we can build some traffic first before devoting more time to coding.

something I found that you should look at...
http://gielladesign....hillary/hillary.html

its just fun

I just read about your idea and saw your site, Can They Lead? How about having information on House Session, which is on C-Span. People need to know what issues our representatives vote on. You can quiz on what issue a politician voted ya or nay.

Cathleen

Cathleen,

I think that would be a great idea. The engine is in place, but I haven't been able to drum up much interest with either users or contributors. I've been sidetracked with other projects and unable to really market this one, but it could easily be extended to do what you suggest.