Political debates are held in public, but the public rarely gets to decide what candidates are asked. The questions are usually chosen by campaigns, debate organizers, journalists, and moderators. Voters may listen to the answers, but they have very little influence over the agenda itself.

The Open Debate Coalition started from the belief that this could change.

Its model used a public online platform where people could submit questions and vote on the questions others had proposed. Moderators could then consider the highest-ranked submissions for the debate. It was a simple shift, but an important one: instead of asking people only to react to a political conversation shaped elsewhere, the coalition gave them a way to help shape the conversation from the beginning.

The coalition was intentionally cross-partisan. The project was not designed to advance one political point of view. Its argument was procedural: whatever people believed, they should have more influence over the questions candidates were required to confront.

The model gained national attention during the 2016 presidential election. The coalition created a process for submitting and ranking debate questions, and ABC and CNN agreed to receive the 30 highest-ranked questions for consideration during a presidential town hall. One crowdsourced question was ultimately asked during the final presidential debate.

In 2017, the coalition brought the format to New York City’s mayoral race. The effort involved NY1, WNYC, Politico New York, Civic Hall, Citizens Union, Intelligence Squared, and the Latino Leadership Institute. Organizers described it as New York City’s first bottom-up mayoral Open Debate.

I worked on community and business outreach for that project. My team contacted thousands of New York City businesses and encouraged owners and other participants to submit the questions they wanted mayoral candidates to answer. We were trying to reach beyond political insiders and the people who already knew how to make their voices heard, inviting participation from those with direct experience of the city’s neighborhoods and economy.

That outreach addressed one of the hardest parts of any participatory system. Building a platform does not guarantee that people will use it. They have to discover the opportunity, understand what is being asked of them, believe their contribution may matter, and decide to take part. The invitation is not a finishing touch. It helps determine whose experiences enter the process at all.

New Yorkers ultimately submitted hundreds of questions and cast more than 44,000 votes. During the October 10, 2017 debate, roughly half of the 90-minute event was devoted to highly ranked public questions. Six platform questions were asked directly, covering homelessness, police accountability, public schools, immigration, real-estate development, and subway delays. Other debate questions were also influenced by public submissions.

The experiment showed that public question sourcing could work in a consequential municipal election as well as on a national stage. The platform was later used to gather questions for New York City public advocate and comptroller debates.

My part in the project was the human side of the system: reaching into the community and helping people cross the distance between having a concern and placing that concern on the public agenda. It connected with a question I had encountered in many forms before. Who gets to participate in the systems that affect them?

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