Hi friends,<br>
<br>
I'm a long-time lurker and finally find occasion to use the "Trebor
told me to post" preamble. For context, I'll disclose that my day job
involves managing Greenpeace's Online Organizing program, with a focus
on online/offline integration, distributed labor, and social networking
strategy. In my other life, I'm a founding member of a Brooklyn-based
political arts collective called Not An Alternative. We function as a
production company for community groups and campaigns, produce
installations, video art, and performative interventions, and manage a
multi-purpose venue called The Change You Want To See Gallery where we
host co-working during weekdays, and free programming pertaining to
art, activism, technology and theory during evenings and weekends. <br>
<br>
I'm writing to let y'all know about Twitter Vote Report, a project
initiated by techPresident, and produced in partnership with a host of
individuals and groups, including Not An Alternative. Twitter Vote
Report is a citizen-driven distributed election reporting system:
voters can use either Twitter.com, text messaging (direct SMS), an
iPhone or Android application, or automated telephone hotlines to
submit
reports about conditions at polling sites. The
<a href="http://twittervotereport.com">http://twittervotereport.com</a>
site aggregates and maps reports in a variety of visualizations so that
voters, the media, and watchdog groups can see the
Nation's voting problems in real-time, and do something about them.<br>
<br>
How long is the wait
in Cleveland, Ohio? Are the new optical scan machines staying up and
running in Palm Beach County, Florida? Is failure to bring ID to the
polls thwarting first-time voters in Indianapolis? With this system we
can get answers to those questions straight from voters
from all over the country. Voters are encouraged to use hashtags to
make the data as useful as possible. We produced an instructional
video to help folks along:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMXuTM_KLs&eurl=http://twittervotereport.com/how-to-help/">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMXuTM_KLs&eurl=http://twittervotereport.com/how-to-help/</a><br>
<br>
The response to the site has been encouraging, media outlets ABC, FOX, CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera have expressed interest in
using the feeds in their election coverage. On election day volunteer
"sweepers" will monitor incoming reports to look for patterns,
highlight notable incidents to pass on to the press and watchdog groups
for verification and follow-up, and to clean up messy data so the
visualizations run smoothly. <br>
<br>
This is definitely a beta iteration, but there are two aspects of this
project that interest me most, beyond the concept itself. <br>
<br>
First, the idea for this project was suggested just a few weeks ago in
a blog post by techPresident writers Allison Fine and Nancy Scola.
Inspired by the use of Twitter at the RNC and DNC mobilizations this
year, they imagined a more scalable scenario in which the tool might
function to crowd-source election reporting (and ultimately protection)
efforts. Over the course of several days the idea took hold among a
broader community of developers, designers and activists. In just a
couple of weeks, using pbWiki, IRC chat channels, physical coding
parties, a googlegroups listserv, and daily lunchtime
<a href="http://freeconferencecall.com">freeconferencecall.com</a> calls, a team of volunteers were able to launch
a multi-channel reporting system, a nice looking site, graphics,
badges, training videos, downloadable flyers, sample outreach emails,
and more. In addition, they leveraged the pro-bono services of a
high-powered PR firm, did blog outreach, and signed on an impressive
list of participating groups, including the Center for Community
Change, Common Cause, Credo Mobile, Demos,
Election Protection Coalition, Independence Year Foundation, Not An
Alternative, NPR's Social Media Desk, PBS, Plodt, Rock the Vote,
Student PIRGs, Twittervision, Video the Vote, Voter Suppression Wiki,
Why Tuesday?, Women Donors Network, and YouTube.<br>
<br>
All of this was done without a single penny spent - just hundreds of
hours of volunteer time (much of it sneaked in during day jobs), and
donations from several companies like Mozes, Twittervision, Plodt, and
others. The combined social networks of the project organizers
certainly contributed to their success in recruiting support at all
levels. A record of the behind-the-scenes planning can be found at
<a href="http://votereport.pbwiki.com">http://votereport.pbwiki.com</a>, and you can also check out the video that
Rocketboom produced at the coding party hosted at The Change You Want
To See Gallery: <a href="http://www.rocketboom.com/rb_08_oct_29/">http://www.rocketboom.com/rb_08_oct_29/</a><br>
<br>
While many on the project team have never met in person, several have
collaborated on previous and related efforts. This brings me to the
second aspect of what I find to be interesting with this model: the
accumulated knowledge and evolving iterations of a continuum of
decentralized volunteer-driven activist technology projects. In any
mobilization there is an explosion of interest and energy, but without
infrastructure to carry momentum beyond the punctuation mark of the big
event, that energy dissipates. We saw this happen in many ways after
the 2004 RNC protests here in NYC. In the year leading up to the
election, seasoned activists and cultural producers came out of the
woodworks, and new ones got involved, creating collectives,
clearinghouses, and collaborative productions. In large part, physical
and virtual platforms for continued coordination after the mobilization
were absent, and the post-election reality was decidedly less
energetic. While this is inevitable to a degree, mechanisms and
opportunities to feed energy from one moment (or movement) into the
next are essential. <br>
<br>
In the case of Twitter Vote Report, one member of the project team says
"many of us were involved in the Hurricanes08.org project just six
weeks ago,
which was structured in the same way - volunteer-driven, decentralized,
heavy emphasis on Twitter and wikis and maps. That project
picked up where the Katrina project left off, which in turn picked up
from where the TsunamiHelp project left off. From my perspective it's
just a continuation of the same project." Over the past few weeks an
all-volunteer force of technical and organizing talent kicked into
rapid
response mode to leverage various technologies and inherited
infrastructure that could function to
quickly crowd-source reports in which eye-witness accounts could play a
very useful role in delivering direct service or
advocacy. Here lives the backbone of something that could be
re-purposed
in interesting ways. Another project team participant says, "I think
this is like the next generation of the hotline. Like the hotline
concept, people can easily 'call-in' to report info, ask for help, etc.
The big difference is that we can 'make sense' of the data in
real-time, visualize it and connect to<br>
external parties."<br>
<br>
While I'll reiterate that this system is in early beta form, the means
by which it was produced and the possibilities for its future are
compelling to me. <br>
<br>
I'll close there. <br>
<br>
Thanks for reading,<br>
<br>
Beka Economopoulos<br>
Not An Alternative<br>
<a href="http://www.notanalternative.net">http://www.notanalternative.net</a><br>