“The most important lesson she [Beth Noveck] draws from previous experiments with online public participation is that sites need to be designed carefully to keep people on topic. “If you don’t frame the debate, if you don’t ask a good question, you don’t get a good answer to the question,” she said. Similarly, having a given discussion running for a short period of time also improves the quality of the conversation, she said, and it also doesn’t overwhelm government officials with far to much to read.” - × × ×