How did President Obama think about a politically-sensitive topic that concerns you a year before his presidency? How about 5 years before his presidency? 10 years? How far back in his public service does his opinion matter?
Politicians talk a lot. Everyday. Their public speeches should showcase their absolute and relative opinions about how they think Government should affect you. Where can you go to see what they said? How compassionate were they about the issues that matter to you? Did they lie? Did their opinion change? Why did it change? We can’t even begin to answer these questions unless we document them.
This project aims to have citizens use their cell phone’s video recorder to document the speeches of local, state, and national representatives. These videos will be uploaded to Wikisource.org, openly licensed using the Creative Commons, and transcribed so that search engines can index these important words.
The goals of phase one:
- Develop a standard Wikipedia-modeled framework for properly documenting public political speeches
- Spread the word to everyone so people know to record their representative’s public speeches
- Spread the word to netizens who wish to transcribe and verify the transcriptions
- Spread the word to journalists and researchers to constructively use this data
- Wiki 1,000 political speeches within a one-year time span
Example: Remarks by the President on Osama bin Laden
Focus Determines Reality 