Geek Activism

I am on Twitter as devanjedi, if you would like to “Follow” me. I am usually more political, off-the-cuff and “live” on Twitter, compared to this blog. Of course, that may change once we get past election season.

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.

Possibly the most fascinating Ebert review ever (read through to the end): http://tinyurl.com/4znebf

In case you were confused, the studio just changed the name of Tarantino’s next movie from “Inglorious Bastards” to “Inglorious Basterds”.

The World’s Tallest Obama Supporter: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/Michelle_Obama_not_actually_all_that_tall.html

Why is Barack Obama advertising on the radio in Massachusetts?

Financial news headlines today obsolete in minutes. The Dow surged 200 points in the past few minutes, but headlines say “losses extended”.

That One ‘08, remixed: http://tinyurl.com/425bvg

Barack Skywalker: A New Hope: http://tinyurl.com/4yax9d

Presidential Debate: McCain just referred to Obama as “that one”.

I could watch this for hours: http://election.twitter.com/

Great Schlep? Maybe I should do something similar for the Indian American community: http://tinyurl.com/3te79b