#inaug09: Twitter Vote Report, the Next Generation
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, January 8 2009
Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC. That's terrific. Central to the thinking behind TVR (of which Andy was a core part) was making the project as open as humanly possible so that it could be repurposed, repackaged, and improved upon. What's particularly exciting to see is that Andy and his co-conspirators, fellow TVP veterans Dave Troy and Andrew Turner, have a plan to achieve something we fell short on in the chaotic scramble of Vote Report: turning local journalists onto the valuable content that was pouring in through the channels we'd set up.
American University journalism professor David Johnson is part of the Inauguration Report team. As Andy tells it, AU journalism students will be on the ground covering the inaugural action. That team has defined a pair of hashtags for use that weekend: #inaug09 for inauguration day itself, and #dctrip09 for people roadtripping it in to the capital. (The possibilities for some awesome map visualizations are pretty obvious.) They're working on making it possible for people to send in text, voice, and video reports of their inauguration experiences. And there's some neat technical refinements in the works, like using iPhones' built in a-GPS to enable location-aware reporting.
But given that inauguration day is in less than two weeks, this is an all hands on deck situation. In particular, they're looking for iPhone app developers and people handy with Rails and Google Maps, but anyone willing to chip in is welcome. Andy has details on how to join up at the end of his description of the project.