President Obama to Hold Google+ Hangout on January 30th

The White House is on Google+, are you? If you aren’t, you might want to get involved if you want the chance to be part of a Google Hangout with the Prez himself. The White House joined Google+ two days ago, announcing its intention to make use of the Hangout feature. Now the — understandably complicated — details of exactly how it will work have come to light.
Naturally, President Obama isn’t going to just hop on Google+, start a Hangout, and throw all caution to the wind; there’s a process. The upside to that is that you can actually play some small part, and stand the chance to be able to play a big part. If you wander over to the White House’s YouTube page, you’ll notice that there are a whole bunch of questions over there, accompanied with some handy “thumbs up, thumbs down” widgets. When the voting has closed, President Obama will answer “a selection” of the top rated question, and join “a selection” of question-submitters in a Hangout scheduled for January 30th. Could be neat, right?

If you want to get your question in, the deadline for submission is midnight January 28th ET, so get kraken crackin’. It seems he’s also going to mention the Hangout in his State of the Union address tomorrow, so expect a glut of new questions then. While the submission cut-off date is clear, there seems to be no mention of the voting cut-off date. Likewise, there’s little information on how the selection of questions will be made, other than a note that it’s not made by the President himself, or the White House, and that the President won’t see the questions beforehand (unless he were to like, look at the top-voted questions before selection).

Also, you might presume that the people who get selected for the Hangout are the ones who asked the picked questions, but all the language on the page says is that they’ll be “a selection of people who submit questions,” so who know’s who that’ll be. All that being said, this is a public government event we’re talking about here, you didn’t expect it to be completely candid, did you? Still, it should be interesting to check out if for no other reason than to see how candid it really seems.

(via The Next Web)

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