Paul's Web Space 2.1

Document the Vote 2008

With so many questions raised about the results of recent Presidential elections, along with the charges of "voter fraud" and counter-charges of vote suppression, it's really true that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Luckily, there are more, better funded and organized, efforts every election cycle to encourage, enable, and publicize the monitoring of the election process along with any potential issues with access to and accuracy of the act of voting.

First I'll highlight the multimedia efforts. Video the Vote was started in 2006 by video journalists and documentarians, who, after watching what they considered to be egregious examples of voter suppression and election irregularities during the 2000 and 2004 election, vowed to use video technology in a attempt to document such irregularities in future elections. This is the first Presidential election to be covered.

From a more purely journalistic perspective, the New York Times has launched a citizen journalism initiative called the Polling Place Photo Project. While less overtly aimed at ensuring fair elections, this project nonetheless encourages more openness, and thus potentially exposes or deters acts that infringe on the exercise of the democratic process.


One of the coolest social media efforts going on is the Twitter Vote Report. Check out this short video tutorial, and report to twitter anything you observe regarding vote supression, long waits, problems you observe at polling places, etc. Use the Twitter hashtag #votereport and your tweet will be aggregated into their data collection system, with results displayed in real time and aggregated on a map and in a database. Follow this effort on Twitter.

In the typical everyone-pitches-in volunteer wiki fashion, another effort is the Voter Suppression Wiki, spearheaded by a small team of volunteers, hooked into and publicizing all the more organized efforts while providing the dedicated social media volunteers a place to pitch in.

One other new project I want to mention is Who Voted, which endeavors to show which registered voters actually cast their votes, providing another data point for analyzing elections retrospectively. Unfortunately only four states are tracked so far — for a variety of reasons, including the cost or availability of these records. This site was just launched by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and funded by Google's Summer of Code program.


Finally, be sure to check out Our Vote Live to follow the election protection efforts tracked by all of these efforts and through people calling the universal 1-800-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline. It will be updated throughout the day (and the entire election season, as long as necessary), and you can follow up-to-the-minute reports on the Our Vote Live Blog. The site was set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for the Election Protection Coalition. Follow them on Twitter too.

Labels: election protection, politics, votereport, voting technology

   Link: http://www.ourvotelive.org/

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Edweek.org Sponsors Teachers College Debate, Produces Election Multimedia

The web site I manage, edweek.org, cosponsored and facilitated the live Webcast of a debate Tuesday evening at Teachers College between the top education policy advisers to the Presidential campaigns — Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser for Sen. Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, Sen. John McCain's top education adviser. Education Week also organized a post-debate panel discussion featuring an array of education policy experts and moderated by Education Week reporter David Hoff, which we videotaped for later viewing.

In addition to the complete debate and panel discussion, we created several clips of discussions on policy issues of interest to our readers, and posted them to related blog. Our Teacher Beat blog discussed teacher preparation and motivation in At Ed Debate, Sparks Fly Over Merit Pay, TFA, and the Campaign K-12 blog posted their impressions of Keegan's and Darling-Hammond's answers to the question Who's Going to Be Education Secretary?. Finally, our producers performed a word cloud analysis of the debate text – In a Word, 'Teachers' Are Center of Debate – described in the blog NCLB Act II.

Elsewhere, our web team created a cool online trivia game – How Well Do you Know the Presidential Candidates? – where you try to guess which candidate uttered various statements about education policy. Also included is a Voter's Guide comparing and contrasting McCain and Obama's positions on various education policy issues. We've collected these features and more on our new Campaign 2008 Multimedia and Interactive Coverage page, along with running Twitter streams displaying "Tweets" about the campaign in general (we're Twittering as @edweek2008elect), and specifically about the Teachers College debate — we created the hashtag #tcdebate for the purpose, which actually spent much of Tuesday evening atop Twitter's Hot Election Topics. These presentations have enhanced our coverage of the election campaign, and exposed our work to new audiences.

Labels: education, edweek, politics, tcdebate, Teachers College, twitter

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/campaign08/mm_coverage.html

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Press Intimidation at the National Political Conventions

There were disturbing examples of police trampling on press freedom at both the Demcratic and Republican national conventions in recent weeks.

First, at the DNC08 convention in Denver, an ABC News producer was arrested outside the hotel where a private breakfast was being held for Democratic party leadership and VIP donors to the party. Nightline was in the midst of a series called "Money Talks," reporting the continued influence of big money donors on the political process, and ABC News correspondent Brian Ross opined "We're getting under their skin, I think."



Then the following week brought many incidents of harassment of independent journalists covering the RNC08 convention in St. Paul. In perhaps the most infamous, Amy Goodman or Democracy Now!, along with two of her producers, were arrested while trying to cover the police response to a demonstration, even though their press credentials were plainly visible. As Goodman recounts the arrests were somewhat violent — her producers were stomped and bloodied and Goodman's press pass ripped from her neck when she protested that they were credentialed journalists.

What possible reason exists for these arrests other than to intimidate journalists interested in covering the dissent – and not just the spectacle – surrounding the conventions. It's a chilly day when freedom of speech is infringed and diverse voices are deliberately silenced and marginalized in conjunction with these highly visible manifestations of our democratic process. And for the most part, mainstream media stood silently by as these events transpired, and for the most part concentrated their coverage on the packaged spectacle.

Labels: DNC08, freedomofspeeech, journalism, politics, RNC08

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DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.


Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Labels: DNC08, edweek, politics, socialmedia, twitter

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