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I’ve been following the Health Care debate since about the middle of the Democratic presidential primary, when all the candidates first announced their plans for how to change things if elected. In that almost two years, I’ve heard a lot about these things: the public option, town hall meetings, teabaggers, Stephen Hawkings, and endless coverage of the National government as if the whole thing were a sports competition about number of Red or Blue votes rather than an important public discussion.

What I didn’t know, until I watched the Daily Show from Feb, 11, 2010, is anything about Hawaii’s health care system, which apparently has achieved almost universal health care coverage via government mandate and has been using this system for the last 40 years. Until that minute I thought there was nothing in the debate that could surprise me anymore.

When Dog the Bounty Hunter, one of the Hawaiians interviewed on the Daily Show’s Hawaii coverage, has a better ability to express the need for health care than the politicians and media personalities whose job it has been to talk about it for the last 18 months, we need to start listening to different people.

I would suggest we start listening to each other.

Here’s the idea. Take $30 but, rather than giving it to a political group or non-profit, go to the store and buy a webcam. Set it up at your computer and record a video on why you care about health care. It can be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or however long it takes to tell your story.

Public Voices

I’m lucky, my office really cares about making sure we have great health care coverage, but I still have a couple stories to tell about issues my coworkers are having with insurance right now. And then there are all the stories of my friends in their 20’s who are trapped in jobs they would otherwise leave for more rewarding work but can’t for fear of losing health insurance. I have almost as many of those stories as I have friends in their 20’s.

So I’m going to go get a webcam and record a couple minutes worth of video and post it online. Maybe we put the videos on YouTube and tag them “healthcarestories” or maybe one of those non-profits that care about health care will come forward and we can put them all there. Then we watch each other, listen to each other, and vote for the best videos. Find the ones that make you remember why you care.

If we want to influence the “public voices” in broadcast media, we could all throw in a couple dollars and buy some air time for the videos with the most votes. Or maybe that media is hopeless and we run some ads telling people where to come for the sane discussion, like throwing a lifeline to pull people back onto dry land.

Either way, if we can get a million of these video messages in a bottle together, a million people engaged in actually talking about health care rather than screaming about it, we can convince a lot of politicians that their interests lie in listening rather than talking for once.

Last Friday morning I sat down at my computer and tried to answer a simple question: whether I needed to move the car that day. On a normal Friday the answer would have been “Yes”, but last Friday there was a light coat of snow over the city that I hoped would bring a snow day from the street cleaning regulations. I ended up disappointed, not because the rules were in effect, they had been suspended hours before, but because the government sites hosting that information (DoT’s site and NYC’s 311 site) were not updated so I ended up with no better information at the end of my search than when I started.

Instead of putting snow day suspensions on the Department of Transportation’s official website, the DoT sent the announcement via twitter, an external, closed, data feed service, though admittedly one with many users. So, rather than using smart tools that could send out twitter feeds and update the official site as part of the same action, or using simple tools like the official website, which would let more capable tools like civx process the information into whatever formats you want, the DoT did the digital equivalent of announcing the news at church and assuming all the relevant people would be there.

Twitter is a closed community with membership and the technology of communication controlled by one company. What bothers me is not that the government went into that system to spread public information; I think we should spread public information wherever the public is, which is why in 2008 I advocated running “get out the vote” drives in World of Warcraft, an online video game much more closed off than twitter. What bothers me is that a single, closed, tool has taken the place of meaningful change in how government communicates with citizens.

Spreading time-sensitive information like parking rule suspension or weather-related school closings using a live feed is a great idea. We should do more information sharing like that but we shouldn’t be doing it only in closed communities and only using closed tools. We should not abandon the simple tools like department websites or the open tools like RSS in an attempt to follow users down whatever latest rabbit hole of closed communication tools it is that they’re using today. And if the tools our government has for publishing information aren’t as capable at distributing that information as twitter, then our government needs new tools, not just twitter accounts.

Farms vs. WoW

In 2006, I read a great blog post that pointed out how the professional media is still working from a very old picture of the American lifestyle. The post, called “Farm Fetish,” explained that more people in the United Stated have World of Warcraft (WoW) accounts than work on farms or ranches. I don’t know exactly where he got his numbers, but the most recent Census ones I can find (2006) list the number of people employed in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations at almost exactly 1 million. Blizzard’s most recently publicized (2008) subscriber numbers claim more than 2.5 million North American players. So the scale of the comparisson is right.

Go where the people are

Ok, so maybe you shouldn’t go to farms or WoW when looking for the statistically average American, but if you’re just looking for votes, that’s different; politicians need to address people wherever people can be found. Even if only a million of the North American players are in the USA and old enough to vote, think of how that compares to the farmer population! And odds are that a significant number of those other million and a half subscribers are simply too young and will be voting eligible by the next presidential cycle.

Take advantage of it

So why shouldn’t political campaigns take advantage of the shared interest? They could hold a “Maintenance Tuesday: Get Out The Vote” campaign to try and get players to commit to voting on Tuesday morning when the North American servers have their weekly maintenance. Using the scheduled maintenance means you don’t have to change anything about the game in order to reach players, and the morning of election day is when lines are shortest.

Talk about it

Since you don’t need to change anything with the game, it can be a very simple campaign, just talk about it. Talk about it in the forums. Talk to other media about it. When talking to people directly, mention it just like you might mention other targeted drives in an effort to get people to vote.

Who knows?

It might work, and you can get great coverage from showing that you actually understand how technology is affecting people’s lives. And it plays in Kansas.