Sorry. I’m actually very happy to see this, but jumped past that. I have been waiting for years to get beyond the 1000s of forums/blogs that are heavily moderated/filtered, and still not looked at when determining policy. Emails to politicians almost always go into perceived black holes.
I have a lot of hopes a single forum under Change.gov or Google, or whatever becomes blessed by this administration.
I’ve had a lot of pent-up frustration waiting for something like this to appear. And once they make some changes/fixes (hopefully quickly, before our major shifts in policy are settled), I’d like to see it rolled out to include any subject related to government. I’m a systems person who has seen a lot of short-sighted application implementations in my day – thus very critical and full of positive suggestions to remedy user interfaces.
I would like to add…
•I had a very difficult time getting back to find and re-comment on the above thread, even after RSS of the thread I started (subscribing in Outlook), or clicking on “Go to comment” on the email I received. What did I miss?

And once something is posted, it should not be able to be edited.

(Continued from above)
* RSS for new threads containing specified keyword search combination (saved searches)
* RSS of a thread’s responses at any point/below in a thread
* Allow more than text in replies (.pdf, video,….), and allow more space in each comment
* Allow the creation of a thread response also linked to another thread.
* Thumbs-up/down needs to be expanded to slightly up/down
I have many specific thoughts on how to make this more manageable and exceedingly extensible, and would welcome a call from the appropriate Obama team so that a better forum/blog can be built for all this Main Street participation.

(Continued from above)
Add the following to my minimum suggestions…
* Sophisticated search capability for [sub]threads sorted by hit score, viewing frequency, or up/down by date/time, and filtered by date/time range, keywords/phrases (and allow for very complex Boolean searches), in titles and/or content. And allow the saving of searches for future visits to the site.* Entries need to have date/time stamp displayed
* Allow the specification of a ‘page’ size and the ability to directly go to a ‘page’ instead of just going to the next and previous ‘page’
* Allow my bookmarking of things I read, so I can find them later
* Google needs to index the forum hourly
(Continued below in a response to my own post)

After seeing thousands of comments here, I know there needs to be a better way to be able to get at pieces of interest as well as a developing (nor not) consensus on particular aspects. A simple forum such as this is not the way to best get feedback from Main Street. I would suggest, at a minimum…
* Titles/one-liners for each thread and allowing the user to expand the thread from there (or by hovering over it see the 1st 100 words/abstract, and clicking to open it in a new browser tab), rather than forcing the person to collapse so much text and not see the structure of the thread
* Associating keywords and phrases with each thread root, allowing respondents the opportunity to add keywords/phrases to their position in the thread and below

I have many specific thoughts on how to make this more manageable and exceedingly extensible, and would welcome a call from the appropriate Obama team so that a better forum/blog can be built for all this Main Street participation.
(Continued below in a response to my own post)

It takes more than streamlining payments. The reimbursement rates must also allow for the provider to treat the patient without loosing money.