Politics

Policy Discussions are Popular

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

Whether you think the health care summit yesterday was a healthy discussion, or just more of the same rhetoric, there is evidence that the summit format, which allows for unscripted and spontaneous discussion, is just way more popular than other big political events:

The White House says that over the course of the day the White House webcast of the summit served 3.9M streams and peaked at 60k concurrent viewers. By contrast the State of the Union webcast served 1.3M streams and peaked of 85k.

For a six-hour policy discussion, a peak of 75% or so compared to a one-hour political speech is pretty impressive. And the White House killed it on facilitating web viewing of the summit by providing embed code for their stream.

More thoughts on what what exciting and new in the summit here.

Full post as published by Open Congress on February 26, 2010 (boomark / email).