[iDC] Twitter Vote Report: distributed election reporting system

[beka economopoulos]

Hi friends,

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.

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 http://twittervotereport.com 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.

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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMXuTM_KLs&eurl=http://twittervotereport.com/how-to-help/

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.

This is definitely a beta iteration, but there are two aspects of this
project that interest me most, beyond the concept itself.

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 freeconferencecall.com 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.

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 http://votereport.pbwiki.com, and
you can also check out the video that Rocketboom produced at the coding
party hosted at The Change You Want To See Gallery:
http://www.rocketboom.com/rb_08_oct_29/

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.

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
external parties."

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.

I'll close there.

Thanks for reading,

Beka Economopoulos
Not An Alternative
http://www.notanalternative.net
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