Geek Activism

I compiled a greatest hits highlights reel of some of the key moments in the campaign. Enjoy.

Until inauguration day on the 20th of January, I will be covering some of the aspects of the transition to the Obama administration that affect technology and open government in a series called Change Watch.

Today, Change.gov was launched. It is the official web site for the “Office of the President-Elect”. It is an extremely forward-looking web site which hopes to capture the enthusiasm and energy of Obamamania before is subsides. The site continues where BarackObama.com left off- except for the user participation part. One hopes that there is a direct way for citizens to participate. Maybe Joe Trippi’s MyWhiteHouse.gov idea?

UPDATE: Alan Rosenblatt at techPresident has a couple of great ideas about how the new President can keep the Obama social network alive- either as an independent community outside of government or as a “white house social network” to directly channel the energy of his supporters.

I’ve been a bit involved with Twitter Vote Report and it is a lot of fun to watch people reporting their voting experiences. I’m helping out with reviewing the reports and some of them are just heart wrenching. (refresh or go to the main site for the latest reports).

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast have a great article on voter suppression tactics at Rolling Stone:

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

I have already written about it, but the Twitter Vote Report project is picking up steam, with a lot of highly talented individuals and organizations involved. The idea is to:

As news outlets and blogs will report on Election Day stories, we are building an invaluable resource for thousands of voters to get immediate help. From questions like “where do I vote” or “how do I make sure that my rights are being upheld,” Twitter Voter Report augments these efforts by providing a new way for voters to send text messages (aka tweets) via cellphones or computers which will be aggregated and mapped so that everyone can see the Nation’s voting problems in real-time.

You can help:

• Join the Google Group and contribute.
• Help out on the Wiki.
• Join the nationwide coding jam on Friday, October 24th.

Right now, you can help out by adding to this set of dummy test data that will be used to test some of the code.

As I had mentioned a few days ago in my round-up of citizen journalism efforts for the 2008 elections here in the United States, Twitter is proving to be ground-zero for the election zeitgeist.


Now we get the Twitter Vote Report project, which has introduced a few tags for election-day reporting about voting issues.

• #votereport- for reporting basic voting issues
• #machine- for reporting voting machine issues
• #registration- for registration problems
• #wait:time- for waiting time, where ‘time’ is number of minutes
• #EP[two letter state code]- for serious legal issues in that state (e.g. EPOH in Ohio)
• zipcode: to denote your exact location

A lot more is being planned to mine, use and act upon this information. There is a code jamming session on the 24th of October and guides are being developed for situations in which the above codes should be used.


techPresident highlights some of the issues that still need to be worked out:

• How do you get real people to use this, as opposed to the twitterati.
• Do we let the response be organic or organized?
• How to clarify the intent of this project (as opposed to the many others being organized)

And so forth. It’s all worth watching and participating in.

Nancy Scola at TechPresident has put together a set of resources to help you vote and make sure it counts. Especially interesting are resources for college students who vote where they go to school and the large variety of rules regarding voting by felons.

I was reading John McCain’s Technology Policy page on his web site and the following stood out:

John McCain Will Preserve Consumer Freedoms. John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose; free to use the applications and services they choose; free to attach devices they choose, if they do not harm the network; and free to chose among broadband service providers.

When Regulation Is Warranted, John McCain Acts. John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like “net-neutrality,” but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices.

The problem? The first paragraph about “preserving consumer freedoms” lists four things that McCain will protect- access content, apps and services, attach devices, and choice of service providers. In the next paragraph, he says that he does not believe in net-neutrality. The problem is that those four freedoms are what the FCC and other independent activists have adopted as the four principles of Net Neutrality.



So- is McCain simply against using the word net-neutrality, while agreeing with it on the four core principles? Lawrence Lessig has a detailed video about McCain’s policy, where he makes the argument that McCain is against regulating network neutrality but would rather leave them to “faith” on the network companies. The video follows (after the jump): Read the rest of this entry »

This election will be remembered as the first one where traditional media relied heavily on citizen journalism and new media. Take a look at Twitter’s Election 2008 live feed to get a feel for the political zeitgeist. Or how Free Press created Rate the Debates to provide actual input from people before the pundits could formulate their conventional wisdom. Or how C-SPAN and NPR mined twitter for live fact checking, dialtests and general citizen journalism.

Well, election day will be no different. Twitter will probably end up being the place to gain a sense of the situation on the ground, but a lot of other web sites are hoping to provide people with the tools to report voter suppression, other problems and experiences. Here are a few resources:

SourceWatch.org’s Election Protection Wiki

The Election Protection Wiki is a non-partisan, non-profit collaboration of citizens, activists and researchers to build a one-stop-shop for reports of voter suppression and the systemic threats to election integrity. We collect just the straight facts that are fully referenced to external, verifiable sources, and we need your help.

Wired’s Election Problem Reporting Site

Over the next weeks, if you have trouble at the polls, either during early voting or on Election Day, we’d like you to add your issue to our map. Be sure to provide as much detail as possible. You may also include links to video or audio.

YouTube & PBS: Video Your Vote

YouTube’s Video Your Vote, a non-partisan program produced in partnership with PBS, encourages American voters to document their voting experiences.

Whether it’s a video shot at the polls on Election Day, an account of your early voting experience, or you filming yourself filling out an absentee ballot — we want you to upload it here.

The Video Your Vote channel is also a one-stop-shop to view exclusive videos from voter registration experts, election reform activists, and state officials, as well as video footage from the PBS archives for a historical look at voting through the years.

Voter Suppression Wiki

This site is designed to be a hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections.

Citizen Media Law Project Blog
Has a lot of resources on the legality of documenting your vote and the areas in and around polling places.

The New York Times Polling Place Photo Project

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this years primaries, caucuses and general election. By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.

Twitter Vote Report Project

Anyone with a Twitter.com account can use their cell phones or their computers to send a message and notify voters and election monitors around the country.

I will add more to this page as I discover them.


UPDATE: Some resources to make sure your vote gets counted.

Let’s get one thing clear: The kid who broke in to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was not a hacker.

I’m not even talking about the debate over the use of the word hacker as a pejorative. At a fundamental level, all this guy did was click on “Forgot Password”, answered “password questions” about Palin and reset her password. I’ll be charitable and call it clever, but let’s not call it hacking.

Unfortunately, any time someone does something remotely reproachable with a computer, the traditional media calls it hacking.

P.S. Make sure the answers to your own “Forgot Password” questions are sufficiently absurd.

That One ‘08

That One was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, That One Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. That One�s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton�s army.

McCains off-hand, inartful description of Obama in last nights debate is now an internet phenomenon. You can buy t-shirts and there’s a facebook page. And here’s the original video.

Obama Gets a Thank You from NASA - [NYTimes.com]

It�s not every day that the head of a federal agency in a Republican administration during an election year writes a glowing thank-you note to the Democratic candidate for president. But Michael D. Griffin, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote a letter to Senator Barack Obama on Oct. 2 stating that that he was �deeply grateful to you, personally� for his work in getting Congress to approve a critically important measure for the space program.

The conventional wisdom in the media about Presidential debate performances forms fairly quickly- within minutes of the debate having ended. Usually this is fed by only one measure- expectations.

For example, the media expectations for this Friday’s debate (if McCain un-suspends his campaign) are that Obama is not a strong debater and McCain does well. If these expectations are met or exceeded, it’s a win for McCain. If Obama is okay, it’s a win for him. Obama only needs to beat expectations, not actually be the better debater. The bar is higher for McCain.

The public has no way to affect the discourse on the debate. While the public are still gathering their thoughts after the debate, the cable news media starts pounding them with opinions and the conventional wisdom is formed by a few loud news analysts.

FreePress- a national, non-partisan, non-profit working to reform the media- has started RateTheDebates.org:

Sign up to Rate the Debates yourself and return here (www.freepress.net/debates) when they air to begin rating. We�ll tally your response along with thousands of others and inject our people-powered feedback into the news cycle - before the mainstream media pundits and spin doctors (mis)interpret the event.

Technology has given us the opportunity�  to immediately insert ourselves in to the national discourse- but, for now, we need numbers to be taken seriously.

Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com summarizes a recent Pew study:

Today they released a new must-read report summarizing findings from “three major election surveys [conducted] with both cell phone and landline samples since the conclusion of the primaries.” The verdict? “Pew’s surveys this year suggest at least the possibility of a small bias in landline surveys.”

Skeptics don’t think that missing “cell-phone only” voters is a big deal for a variety of reasons. Weighting a poll by age demographics should already account for any missed voters, but that assumes that those with landlines vote similarly to those without. The average “cell-phone only” user tends to be younger and hence- presumably- an Obama voter.

A few days ago Nate Silver at the awesome FiveThirtyEight.com compared results from pollsters that include cell phones with a control group that does not and observed an approximately 2% bias against Obama in polls that did not include cell phones. The Pew study finds a similar effect.

Many people had predicted a similar effect in the 2004 election, but Bush’s margins over Kerry in the polls proved to be correct. Of course, there are many more people sans landlines in 2008 than there were four years ago.

Obama Says Bailout Should Include 4 Conditions - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com

Adding some specificity to proposals he has already made, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, called for a payback plan for taxpayers if the bailout succeeds; a bipartisan board to oversee the bailout; limits on any federal money going to compensate Wall Street executives; and aid to homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgages.

I like it- I’m not an economist, I don’t play one TV and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night. But specificity from the candidates is good. Will look for McCain’s specifics. UPDATE: And McCain, not to be outdone, wants five conditions on the bailout:

McCain insisted on greater accountability, a way for taxpayers to recoup the cash fed into the fund, total transparency in the review and implementation of the legislation, and no profits for Wall Street execs.