Well, this is interesting. The New York Times is reporting that the FBI is pursuing charges against Queens man for, it seems, posting Twitter updates about police actions during G20 Summit protests in Pittsburgh:

A criminal complaint in Pennsylvania accuses him of "directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse."

"He and a friend were part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20," Mr. Madison’s lawyer, Martin Stolar, said on Saturday. "There's absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability."

Actually, as a question of law -- rather than of organizing tactics -- this turns out to be not all that interesting in most ways but extremely interesting in one: what role Elliot Madison, which is the man's name, thought he was serving. If you're using Twitter as a broadcasting medium (and assuming you've made your Twitter stream public) it's not immediately obvious how it differs from coordinating a political action using fliers or the web or the radio, which are all kinda old hat at this point. But what if instead your main function in this communications ecosystem is to retweet information, acting as a relay point? Does that change your responsibilities and liabilities? If you have 10,000 Twitter followers versus 100 Twitter followers, does that make your actions merely different in degree, or different in kind? Those aren't necessarily distinctions the law recognizes yet. But if law enforcement keeps up monitoring Twitter -- and let's face it, they'd be silly not to -- they're questions that courts might soon have to start considering.

(For us here at techPresident, this story is particularly poignant: it was the very similar use of Twitter to mobilize protesters during the RNC '08 protests that inspired the Twitter Vote Report project we helped lead.)

(Photo credit: whatleydude)

It's an honor just to have been recognized. Naturally, the far more satisfying honor is actually winning the thing, but whatever. We'll take what we can get. [Twitter] Vote/Inauguration Report was named a "notable entry" in the 2009 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, amongst such fine company as the Washington Post's TimeSpace feature and the Boston Globe's The Big Picture. Congratulations to all involved.

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...

A quick check in on what's happening on the online front when it comes to the Indian parliamentary elections. Vote Report India and other online transparency projects have gotten a good deal of positive press attention, it seems. The Vote Report India blog mentions TV spots on Channel France 24 and newspaper coverage within India, in the Middle East, and elsewhere. Looking on from 7,000 miles away, though, it's tough to know just how successful Vote Report India has proven without knowing more about the context and contours of the country and its political scene. That said, as the U.S. version of Vote Report did as well, Vote Report India has succeeded in capturing the craziness and color of the election process. One report from Delhi has the chief voting official there not listed on the voter rolls. Another from the Punjabi city of Ludhiana tells the strange case of what's effectively moonshine flowing freely in the days of the election -- so much so that the bootleggers have to switch from using water to making use of, ehem, other fluids. Anyhoo, transparency is one thing. Participation is another. And while the Indian elections this go round may have experienced a new degree of wired transparency, it wasn't coupled with a renewed vigor in participation. Over on Global Voices, Vote Report India lead Gaurav Mishra explores why his project ran alongside an actual decrease in voter turnout in Mumbai. (Vote Report India poster by The Comic Project)

First Maureen Dowd writes a (justly parodied) silly diss of Twitter, and now Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Times Sunday Magazine, offers his own misreading of Twitter's importance for politics. Like many inside the Beltway, Bai focuses on the handful of DC insiders who have begun using Twitter to share details of their day--some inane, some intimate and some genuinely illuminating. But to him, this is most like former Senator Bob Graham's obsessive compulsive diary-keeping: "just plain weird." He adds, "it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s."

I guess some of the smart kids in the mainstream media just refuse to learn something new until you spell it out for them. So here's a note to Matt Bai and the other big-foot journalists who are dismissing Twitter...

We're pleased to announce that Twitter Vote Report has won a Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University. Vote Report bested all the competition in the "Best Animation or Mash-up" category, despite involving very little actual animation.

Seriously, though, a huge congratulations is due to those many people who poured a whole lot of hours in the weeks just before election day building Vote Report. From tech to press to volunteer coordination, a remarkable team coalesced almost immediately to cobble together what we can now proudly call an award-winning tool. Even from close up, it was an impressive feat. So, a big hooray to all involved.

The awards will be presented at next week's Politics Online conference in DC. A few of us from the techPres/PdF will be there. And so will such tech-politics notables as Senator Claire McCaskill and Rep. John Culberson. If we can snag a photo of them actually tweeting in the wild, we'll totally post it.

The word for this is, quite simply, awesome. It's going to take all my narrative powers to tell this story quickly in a way that makes any sense. But as the pirates say, 'ere goes.

"Slumdog Millionaire," Kate Winslet, and...Twitter Vote Report? Yes, it just might be. The completely volunteer-driven election '08 vote reporting project that began as a mere seed of an idea on this humble blog has been nominated for a Golden Dot Award from the Institute of Politics, Democracy, & the Internet. We're competing in the "Best Animation or Mashup" category against JibJab's "Time for Some Campaignin'" video. Quite a broad category, but, hey, a nom's a nom. Didja know the dudes at JibJab regularly kick puppies and only recycle when people are looking? We're just saying. Voting is open to all, so make your preference (Vote Report) known (Vote Report).

With only a handful of days left until people start flooding towards DC to celebrate the inauguration, the time has come to check back in with InaugurationReport. The project, you'll remember, is sort of the next generation of the Twitter Vote Report, iterating off of what was learned in that attempt to use social media to spotlight voting problems and success stories around the '08 election. A good chunk of the best details around IR'09 will be shaking out in the next few days, as the team at NPR.org and the independent folk working on the project scramble across the finish line. That said, we've got a few neat developments to report -- the first of which is that rather handsome logo to the right. Gorgeous!

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.