A. Change Dot Com?
B. Change Dot Gov?
C. Change Dot Org?
1. An official website for communicating to the incoming Obama Administration your ideas on how our government and nation could change?
2. A social network site for developing, discussing and promoting ideas on how our nation should change?
3. A site promoting underwear, which can be a useful thing to change?
Non-Indentical Twins: Change Dot Gov & Change Dot Com
Dot Gov and Dot Org address a common problem: how can citizens make our government work?Voting alone is not enough; participation in elections is only a start. The actual act of governance is key, but it's hard to participate. Letters, phonecalls and emails can get lost in the flood of millions of one-way messages, from us to the political leaders we hire on our behalf. Few of us can afford the time away from work and/or family to knock on the White House door.
The web can change that process by radically dropping the transaction cost of citizen involvement in government decisionmaking. How this works in practice remains to be seen, but it costs very little to try to influence our government on important issues. It is to the credit of the Obama Administration that it is trying to increase citizen involvement, and it is not surprising that a private effort is being a bit more nimble in actually getting discussion going.
Change Dot Gov
The incoming Obama Administration has an innovative website which (in theory) makes it easier for individuals and small groups. How this works in practice remains to be seen but it costs nothing to try to influence our government on important issues.Go to http://www.change.gov; within that site are various topics. You can click around to the ones that interest you, use the search feature, or go directly to a few that I've listed below.
Then ... and this is the IMPORTANT part ... click on the "Submit Your Ideas" box to share your ideas. And get your friends & family to do the same.
Don't be shy. Working with our fellow citizens to tell our government what to do is what our nation's Founders envisioned!
Topics I suggest you try
Please note I am NOT telling you HOW you should think on these issues; it's just my opinion that you SHOULD think on them.- Iraq
What the heck are we DOING there? How can we get our troops outta there? What our obligations to the people whose country that is?: http://change.gov/agenda/iraq_agenda/ - Veterans
Access to prompt and high-quality healthcare; the claims backlog; post traumatic stress disorder, etc.: http://change.gov/agenda/veterans_agenda/ - Civil Liberties
domestic surveillance, torture, Habeas Corpus: http://change.gov/agenda/homeland_security_agenda/
Change Dot Org
Change.gov has some great features, but it's not as terribly interactive. It's like a very efficient email system, that let's you read the Obama team's position on various issues and submit your commits & ideas.Another approach is the privately-developed http://www.change.org. This is FAR more interactive, in that it lets you suggest issues and then promote them with other people anywhere in America.
For instance, check out the Issues Page. You can suggest a cause, but more likely, any cause you're interested in is already listed by some like-minded person who just got here first. You can join the cause, use a variety of facilities to discuss a cause, share information with a variety of tools, organize activities in support of (or in opposition to) the cause, and so forth. No doubt one of the activities might be to petition the incoming Obama Administration on your cause ... making change.gov's functionality a subset of that of change.org!
Change Dot Com
Underwear! On models!
What's not to like?
I applaud the site owner's cleverness in jumping on the "Change" bandwagon, using scantily clad supermodels; as the Romans never said: "Semper ubi sub ubi!"
Let me close this discussion of the top 3 change sites with my favorite videos on change:
spread the news at digg.com
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