Obama Goes Virtual with an Online Town Hall

President Obama hosted the first ever online Town Hall with streaming video at WhiteHouse.gov today. The process, which used the new Google Moderator service, encouraged people to ask questions about the economy and vote for their favorites. The President then responded to some of the most popular questions during the Town Hall.

This innovative approach to asking for general input and for communicating with the American people (and the world at large) is what we are beginning to expect from the Obama administration, who made heavy use of social networking platforms during the campaign. The result was an engaging forum acknowledging the questions that are foremost on the mind of the American people.

This was a great first attempt at the Online forum, but it had a few drawbacks. Future Town Halls should address the need for:

• Better acoustics
• American Sign Language interpretation or Closed Captioning for the hearing impaired
• A mechanism for posting the current question for us to refer to as it's being addressed
• A scheduled time slot that doesn't interfere with the work day (many people cannot stream video at work)

I won't try to capture the content of the online Town Hall as I wouldn't do it justice. If you missed it, you can catch the full video or transcript at WhiteHouse.gov.