Twitter Vote Report Goes to India

The month long elections in India begin on April 16th, and Twitter Vote Report will be there for the ride! Here is the skinny on Vote Report India from Jon Pincus:

Vote Report India will partner with citizens’ networks, human rights organizations, and journalists to contribute direct SMS, email and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). It will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. The interactive map will allow tracking the irregularities in the campaigns leading up to the elections, the voting experience on the day of the elections, and the results themselves.

At one level, Vote Report India will serve as a critical initiative aimed at nurturing transparency and accountability in the Indian election process. At another level, the platform will provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.

“Vote Report India is powered by two path-breaking non-profit open-source projects — Ushahidi and SwiftRiver — and managed by eMoksha. Ushahidi is an award-winning platform that crowd-sources crisis information. SwiftRiver is a platform that makes sense of multiple sources of information in a fast-changing crisis situation. eMoksha is a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.”

The amazing life of Vote Report continues!

Proposed Tagging Framework for Twitter Campaign

Jon Pincus’ proposes a framework on his Voter Suppression Wiki for using hashtags for using Twitter on Election Day.  Would love to hear what folks think about this and how to make it workable in real-time on the ground:

To be used for Twitter hashtags, photos, videos, blog posts, abbreviations in SMSs, and t-shirts.

Location

The location the rest of the message refers to

[state] + [first four letters of the county] + [precinct, if known]

So, in downtown Cleveland, for example, the hashtag would be #OHCuya07

Questions:

1) how to encode state-wide information?
2) special case college campuses?

Incident type

Use one of these codes when reporting information about something happening at a location.

vmm — voting machine malfunction
wait — current waiting time
hava — accessibility (Help America Vote Act) issue
extend — polling times extended
help — help wanted (typically for investigation)
??? — fraudulent registrations

Alert type

Use one of these codes when sending out an alert.

media — a story!
blog — something for the bloggers
gtwo — short for “get the word out”, a message that needs to go out

Party information

If the incident applies to voters of a particular party, or the alert is intended for supporters of a particular party

dem
rep
green
lib
const
…

Source

When relaying information from a trusted source. These should be used very sparingly but could be useful as backup channels for emergencies.

sos — Secretary of State.
camp — a campaign
rov — registrar of voters

Twitter Campaign Momentum

The best part of working in a networked-way is throwing out an idea and seeing what people do with it.  Nancy Scola and I threw out this idea of using Twitter to monitor voting problems and much to our delight we got a great response from a variety of places.  Here are posts from Joe Trippi and Liza Sabater.  In addition, Jon Pincus has added this effort to his Voter Suppression Wiki.

I’d love to hear what folks think about the idea, any potential pot holes or would like to help us strategize more about this on a conference call on Friday just let me know by comment here or email.