Attendees

Allison Fine

Nancy Scola

Amanda Hesser

Demetrie Tyler

Mike Bhukin

Jon Pincus

Scott Novakowski

Next step: conference call on Wednesday, 10/15

- how about 4 pm. Eastern/1 p.m Pacific

Action items:

- headbangingly simple design, Allison + Plodt

- terminology/framing: Allison, Micah, Jon

- detailed underlying grammar: defer for now

- identify likely sweet spots: 

-- geography: Indianapolis [Allison], Cuyahoga [Allison],  North Carolina and Virginia ...

-- topic: provisional ballot eligibility (needs lawyers on the ground -- how do we get people to say "don't leave"), monitoring poll closing?  [Jon to follow up with Barbara Simons]

- contact with Twitter: Amanda and Micah to join up

- looking into mapping software.  Demetrei (Jon to follow up with Conor Kenney on heat map connections)

- start talking with "friendlies" on an ad hoc basis, but defer going out wider until we've got more infrastructure

- proposals for how things would look/work on Plodt side: Plodt folks

Agenda

* Introductions (5-10 min)

* Overall context: grassroots election monitoring/alerting, partnering with other organizations (5-10 min)
* Tagging proposal (10-15 mintues)

* Plodt for per-county, per-state information, other uses? (10-15 minutes)
* Next Steps (10-15 minutes)

Overall goal of "the twitter project": augment traditional efforts with citizen-led participation.

Allison, Nancy: very important that this be non-partisan.

Allison, Nancy: so much of the efforts of the voting rights community is legalistic. they've got thousands of lawyers; where's the citizen effort?  we think of this as an augmentation idea -- supplement the traditional groups with the latent power of citizen activists.  we've got the tagging idea; how to orgnanize it and create critical mass.  if nothing else, identify areas that are likely to be hotspots.  e.g.: indianapolis, where they haven't told people where the new polling machines are; the precincts in cuyahoga county where machines haven't kept pace with registratins.  even if we don't get to scale, it's a perfect opportunity to pilot in those areas -- both in advance (early voting), and on election day. 

Keeping conversation focused on twitter: Plodt topics.  e.g., all the tweets related to elections go there, could be useful.   Plodt's core strength right now: ranking via time.  What about a real-time map?  Not there yet ... maybe.  866-OUR-VOTE is working with somebody at Harvard (?) to do a heat map; can we coordinate with them?  Allison to follow up -- we might be able to give them a feed.

Tagging: Mike: Plodt's syntax is to surround by asterisks, with an optional ranking.  Every tag can potentially have a ranking.  split out into components: *ma* *bost* *wait 20".  visualizations for tags without ranking are limited.  

Jon: essentially, sub-fields for allison's propsal

Allison: the only way it'll scale is if its super-simple -- if people can get it (mostly) right and its not too intimidating.  concerned about having too many categories.  there's only so much we can ask people to do.  does it make sense to take it in two stages: people who can sweep data quickly at a macro level, and then to go back to clarification.  if we're getting enough of them in an area, we can go back to them.  "headbangingly simple for anybody to report a problem".  "cuyahoga 7" ... hopefully if we get enough, we'll be able to go back.  jon: reported.

? i don't know my precinct.  i just want to report my zip code.  the simplest way for me is a 1-2-3: here's my experience, here's my wait.

very simple: zipcode, 3 options for problem (wait, machines, registration), maybe "overall experience"?  

plodt requires following on twitter; if not, we'd need to set up some communication with Twitter (a hashtag?)

what else will we want to monitor?  [Jon: maybe something as polls close down for the day]

Scale

if we get Rock the Vote, League of Young Voters, Color of Change ... hundreds of thousands, possibly low millions?

Terminology

Election protection?  Something *positive* and non-partisan.  Allison

Key groups/contacts

Scott: 866-OUR-VOTE, Common Cause.  And then local groups.

- two good resources here

-- Election Protection wiki's list, which includes several in Ohio http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Election_protection_and_reform_organizations

-- Voter Protection wiki's contact list and

Amanda: Twitter's election day coverage.  (PdF was thinking of requesting a voter suppression area.)

Next conference call: next Wednesday.