Deconstructing (Twitter) Vote Report: Lessons Learned and What's Next
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 8 2009
One of things that made the Twitter Vote Report project so darn exciting during the '08 U.S. election also, at times, threatened to pull the whole shebang under. The thing simply had dozens of moving parts. We had people working on the technological challenges of weaving together a handful of input channels, a few different servers, and a couple different user interfaces. Some of us were focused on building political relationships with the established groups in the election protection space. Others did volunteer management. A few key folks did press outreach. Then there were the calm souls whose main role was keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. All of it had to be be pulled off in a little over three weeks. Vote Report was an inspiring demonstration in the power of ad hoc collective action to do a little good. But it also was confusing, even (or, maybe, especially) for those of us smack in the middle of it.
Nina Keim and Jessica Clark of American University's Center for social media have done a great job of compiling a report that chronicles the creation and execution of Twitter Vote Report from a few thousand feet up. Their just-released study is called "Public Media 2.0 Field Report: Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics —Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report 09." It deconstructs not only TVP, but the other projects that have followed, including citizen-reporting around the 2009 presidential inauguration in DC and vote reporting in India's recent election. There's much to be learned from these projects on how to, to borrow an idea from Clay Shirky, organize without organizations. To that end, the American University report is an essential debrief. Here's how Keim and Clark introduce their work.
Twitter Vote Report (TVR) was an all-volunteer nonpartisan online project designed to encourage voters in the 2008 U.S. presidential election to submit brief accounts of their voting experiences using mobile and online tools. Developed in less than a month, the project generated more than 12,545 submissions, marshaled more than 7,500 contributors, and involved nearly 20 highly skilled volunteers and partners.
And a taste of what they found:
Throughout 2008, Twitter -- a privately funded social media website that allows users to submit and share 140 character posts (or “tweets”) online or via SMS -- had been gaining momentum as a tool for reporting, mobilization, and electoral commentary. The lack of discussion about how Twitter could be used to help citizens communicate with one another on Election Day intrigued Nancy Scola, associate editor at the Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident blog, and Allison Fine, a senior editor at the Personal Democracy Forum and senior fellow at Demos. This led them to draft blog post about it, which became the genesis for TVR. As the two project founders wrote, “[F]or far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there’s an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time.” The post immediately generated excitement in the technology and government transparency communities, and volunteers with considerable programming skills began to emerge.
Read the full thing here.