The New York Times launched a nice looking system that takes hopes for the new president from 200 people they interviewed and lets you vote for any you agree with. You can see it here. One thing really bothers me about it though and that's that you can't add another 'Hope' beyond those that were identified by the initial 200 people. For the record, I wanted to add "Resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine" but the closest I could find was "World Peace" or perhaps "Global Image"...lame.
It's important for systems like this to embrace the notion that users will not just want to click a button and support what has been. Editorially, it's certainly a lot easier to have a static pool of 'Hopes' but it really limits the benefit of the system in my opinion when you offer a system that makes people want to participate and then takes away or too heavily limits their voice.
All that said, this is a great example of using a collaborative system to aggregate opinions and raise awareness and I applaud the Times for it. Hoping to see more.
Update I: On closer inspection, the Times does allow you to add a new hope using the Comments feature. This isn't being aggregated into the 'Hope Wall' but does have a 'Recommend' feature in the Comments to up vote what you agree with. Definitely better, but not as good as it could have been.
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