There was a good post at Wired’s Epicenter blog about some of the ways that the White House might improve Open for Questions.  The highest ranked question from the event, of course, was whether or not Obama supported the legalization of marijuana as a way to improve the economy.  At first, I thought the marijuana question was kind of ridiculous, and clearly the result of advocates for marijuana legalization gaming the system.  Now I’ve come to believe that this kind of “fringe” question is exactly the kind of organic interaction that you would want the government to engage in when it uses social media.  The traditional media is not going to ask certain kinds of questions.  And as the Wired post notes, the marijuana question seems to have sparked a constructive debate that is relevant to our economy and the current drug-related violence in Mexico.

There is still a lot of improvement needed if the White House is going to use a platform like Open for Questions to its full capacity.  But the new media team appears to be listening to the feedback.  If you haven’t seen it, their latest installment of Open for Questions is worth watching.  The question relates to health insurance for people with disabilities:

The Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy answered the question here.