Liminal states

Update: w00t, w00t, Voter Suppression Wiki is mentioned in Noam Cohen’s Casting a Ballot, and a Wary Eye in the New York Times — and I’m quoted (“The interesting challenge — the story in progress — is how do we coordinate our efforts”)!   Mom will be proud 🙂

We’re roughly at the midpoint of the Voter Suppression Wiki’s Workshop on Last-minute strategies for reducing voter suppression.  After brainstorming and identifying opportunities over the weekend, we’re going to be starting to draft the report today.  Tomorrow, we’ll begin work on the press release as well, and issue both the report and press release Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.

We made a huge amount of progress on our Saturday conference call, with some common themes jumping out — in particular, opportunities for community organizations, media, and bloggers to supplement all the work going on.  A good example: Linda talked about how when she discovered she had been removed from the rolls, she found a link on MSNBC that directed her to the 1-866-OUR-VOTE Election Protection hotline who helped her get in touch with the right people.  If information like this was featured prominently on the front pages of mainstream media web sites, it could help a lot of voters …

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On Saturday, Jon hosted a major organizing conference call that became a strategy session for countering voter suppression nationwide. And, so, in a bit of marvelously self-reflexive irony, with Jon’s help, we’ll be using that same approach to make this hour of our show into a kind of national town meeting of the air, by modeling some of the local connections we’re making, while also connecting with others in Jon’s networks doing other important work in localities nationwide. Somewhat confused by all of this? Tune in on Sunday to see how it works in practice…. but, regardless, be sure to join in our conversation by calling us at 321-1670 (local) or 1-877-867-1670 (nationally).
— John Quinlan and Harry Waisbren, Forward Forum.net

These discussions are part of the Voter Suppression Wiki’s October 25-28 Workshop on Last-minute Strategies to Reduce Voter Suppression — see the announcement for more context.  We laid some ground work for this in a phone call yesterday, and there are a lot of interesting potential topics to cover — as well as important stuff happening in Wisconsin, as Ed Garvey’s Cheers for the voters! on Fighting Bob describes.

Please join us!

jon

PS: If there are topics you’d like us to cover, either in the on-air discussion or follow-on online, please mail them to forwardforum@aol.com … or leave them in comments here.

Executive summary

Please take a minute to help by providing test data for an election monitoring project!

Details

Momentum on the Twitter Vote Report continues to build — Nancy Scola and Allison Fine’s excellent update from Monday already looks out of date, and as the steadily-growing partners list implies, we’re making excellent progress towards the ambitious goal of  providing national real-time feedback of election problems.  Most importantly, we’ve got a logo — designed by TechGrrl Deanna Zandt, and it’s gorgeous!

Also importantly, the planning for Friday’s Jam Session is coming along nicely, including on the software side: we’re getting user stories in place, as well as firming up the grammar for hashtags and the database design.  There’s enough in place that people are prototyping the first applications … and this morning, in the chat room, Dave said he was at the point where he could really use some test data for an iPhone app he’s working on.

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The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)’s Technology and Democracy 2.0 report on “e-Deceptive campaign practices” is getting released on Monday, along with a parallel report from Common Cause and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights covering the legal and policy issues.  Contributors include computer security legends like Peter Neumann (of Bell Labs, SRI and comp.risks fame) and Bruce Schneier, Erik Nilsson of Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility, Poorvi Vora of George Washington University, Juan Gilbert of the Human Centered Computing Lab of Auburn University, Lillie Coney of EPIC … and me.  Pretty illustrious company.  Mom will be proud 🙂

“Deceptive campaign practices” has a very specific meaning in election protection work.  From EPIC’s announcement:

Deceptive campaigns are attempts to misdirect targeted voters regarding the voting process for public elections. Election activity that would be considered deceptive could include false statements about polling times, date of the election, voter identification rules, or the eligibility requirements for voters who wish to cast a ballot. Historically, disinformation and misinformation efforts intended to suppress voter participation have been systemic attempts to reduce voter participation among low-income, minority, young, disabled, and elderly voters. In 2008, millions of new voters are engaging the political process through Internet communication, which presents an opportunity to review the technology and the incident of e-deceptive campaign practices.

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Welcome to those who have gotten here via my appearance on Meet the Bloggers! The Voter Suppression Wiki is a non-partisan hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections. For more information, please see our strategy and talking points, Baratunde Thurston’s launch post on Jack and Jill Politics, and my series of posts on Liminal States (most of which are cross-posted on Pam’s House Blend and Oxdown Gazette).  If you’d like to get involved, please introduce yourself, check the help wanted, roll up your sleeves, and jump in!

If you’re hear to watch me, Brad Friedman and James Rucker on Meet the Bloggers, the video is at the end of the post.

If you’d like to help fight voter suppression, please get involved!

One of the things we’ve talked a lot about with the Voter Suppression Wiki is the importance of looking at bridging the gap from the online to the offline community.  A good way of understanding this is by imagining two congressional districts: Techville and Reality City.

Techville is relatively affluent, mostly-white, and as the name implies, a high-tech hotbed.  “Everybody” uses Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of cool web 2.0 thingies I’ve never heard of — as my brother Gregory K would say, they’re pretty well connected.  Their local election board is well-funded and very proactive; they’ve got a great training program for election-day pollworkers, and many local high-tech companies encourage their employees to take the day off to volunteer.

Reality City, by contrast, is poorer, with a lot of minorities and Spanish speakers, and several large retirement communities.  It’s on the “wrong side of the digital divide”, so while there are some highly-wired residents  (especially students), computer usage in general is low.  Just like everywhere else in America, people are fired up about the election, and so registration has surged.  Unfortunately, there’s no money, so there aren’t enough voting machines to go around; and they haven’t been able to hire enough staff to validate all the registrations or find enough volunteers for election day.

Voter suppression is almost certainly likely to be more of a problem in Reality City than Techville; and so from an election protection perspective, that’s where we’d like to focus our efforts.  In practice, though, an online focus risks doing exactly the opposite.

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Cross-posted on Oxdown Gazette and Pam’s House Blend

The Voter Suppression Wiki is a non-partisan hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections. For more information, please see our strategy and talking points, Baratunde Thurston’s launch post on Jack and Jill Politics, and my series of posts on Liminal States.  If you’d like to get involved, please introduce yourself, check the help wanted, roll up your sleeves, and jump in!

With only three weeks to go until Election Day on November 4, it’s time for the Voter Suppression Wiki to start shifting to action mode.  Our challenges at this point are pretty typical of nascent activism groups: building a large enough community and getting enough visibility to have an impact, linking up with partners and allies, getting good communications channels in place, and learning to work together effectively.

We’re doing pretty well on all of these fronts, actually: with over 100 people involved we’ve got the core of a community; we’re expecting more press attention later this week; and we’ve had initial discussions with allies like SourceWatch and their Election Protection Wiki, Twitter Vote Report‘s grassroots election-monitoring plan, and CREDO action’s SMS-based Immediate Response Network.  There’s also been a lot of good discussion on the wiki in threads like How can we do better at getting the word out? Still, tempus fugit; so now’s a good time to start moving things forward more quickly.

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cross-posted on Oxdown Gazette

The conversation in the blogosphere is — I sincerely hope — about to change.

— Jane Hamsher, And the Big Announcement Is…, Firedoglake, July 2008

I’ve spent a bunch of time at Firedoglake’s Oxdown Gazette this last week, regularly checking the home page and recommended stories, commenting here and there, as well as making eight posts of my own starting with Hiiii (waves) — enough to form some definite impressions.   So I thought it would be interesting to share them and see what others have to say.

Different people are on Oxdown for different reasons; so let me start with a bit about my perspective.   I’m currently engaging in a lot of online activism while working on a book about social networks (professional bio here).  I started my blog Liminal States last year with a goal of mashing up discussions about computer security and software engineering, social networks, politics, critical theory, psytrance, and personal stuff.  As an activist, though, it’s important to have a base in the progressive blogosphere as well; with Get FISA Right, for example, OpenLeft played a critical role.   My style is very collaborative, and a community-oriented site like Oxdown has a lot of appeal; and so for the Voter Suppression Wiki I decided to experiment with cross-posting there as well as Pam’s House Blend.
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One area that we think the Voter Suppression Wiki can potentially add a lot of value is getting the word out more rapidly: about important updates like polling location changes or extended polling times, and to alert the community about deceptive campaign practices.  Today, it can often take over a week for information to make it out broadly once its discovered.  How can we do better?

The deceptive flyers in Philadelphia are an interesting case study.  Their warning that “you’ll be arrested if you try to vote with unpaid traffic fines our outstanding warrants” is a classic,* and Drexel students reported it on September 22.  It was posted to the wiki after Tom Namako’s City Paper article Voter Intimidation Tactics are Afoot at Drexel, on September 24, and the 1-866-OUR-VOTE folks issued an alert Watching out for deceptive campaign practices in Pennsylvania on September 26.  Even so, it was almost another week before Catherine Lucy’s Vote Scam Flyers Target Black Neighborhoods appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News for the first appearance in the mainstream media (MSM) on October 2.

The good news is that word is getting out — the Daily News article was followed by a flurry of attention.  Suppose, though, that the time had been much more compressed … for example, deceptive flyers being posted the weekend before the election.  In that case, the reaction will need to be a lot faster.

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Guess who has a post-dissertation job? [Yes, that implies I’m actually going to finish this *#$@! dissertation.] ::bounce:: In January, I will be joining the newly minted Microsoft Research New England in Boston, MA. w00000t!!!!! I couldn’t be more ecstatic.

— danah boyd, I will be joining Microsoft Research in January, apophenia, September 2008

“Breaking through barriers is what research is all about. We’re going to New England to break through barriers between core computer science and social sciences, and to do fundamental research that can lead to deeper insights and better computing experiences in an increasingly online world.”

—   Jennifer Chayes, Managing Director, Microsoft Research’s newly-opened New England lab, September 2008

OK, maybe this is obvious to everybody outside the field of computer science; but within the field, we are in the process of a major paradigm shift – when I get excited, I describe it as a Kuhnian “scientific revolution in progress”, which might be stretching things, but just a little.  Computer scientists have historically identified either as mathematicians (ah, the purity) or physicists (pretty good purity and much better government funding); but if you look at the kinds of problems we are trying to solve now (bunches of different aspects of the security problem, privacy, usability of pervasive computers, changing business models, e-voting) it seems pretty clear that the key issues relate to people and the way they communicate and organize themselves, rather than discovering the underlying physical laws of the universe — in short, the domain of social sciences.

— Jon Pincus, Computer science is really a social science (draft), BillG ThinkWeek paper, January 2005

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I’m currently scheduled to be on a Meet the Bloggers‘ discussion of voting rights on October 17, along with Brad Friedman of THE BRAD BLOG and presumably at least one other guest. It’s a great opportunity to get the word out about the Voter Suppression Wiki, and in particular to enlist other bloggers in helping us. What to discuss in my blog post (or posts) before the show?  What to concentrate on during the 30 precious minutes of airtime?  Where to focus energy for follow discussions?

I set up a page on the wiki to sketch my thinking — and even more importantly, to get others ideas. Feedback welcome, there or here!

Brad’s a voting rights expert, and so if I get a chance I’d rather focus on the activism and social computing aspects of our campaign. This ties in both with my recent experiences and my multi-year research agenda of computer science as a social science — and I think will be interesting in general for the Meet the Bloggers audience, because it’s not something I’ve seen discussed there before.

Here are some very quick initial thoughts on the topics I could potentially cover:

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I think I’ll let others tell the story for me …

September 25:

In collaboration with Harvard sociology graduate students Kevin Lewis and Marco Gonzalez, and with UCLA professor Andreas Wimmer and Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, Berkman Fellow Jason Kaufman has made available a first wave of Facebook.com data through the Dataverse Network Project.

The dataset comprises machine-readable files of virtually all the information posted on approximately 1,700 FB profiles by an entire cohort of students at an anonymous, northeastern American university.

— Tastes, Ties, and Time: Facebook data release, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

September 29:

The “non-identifiability” of such a dataset is up for debate….  According to the authors, the collection of the dataset was approved by the IRB, Facebook and the individual college.  The dissemination of the dataset appears to be approved by the IRB.

— Facebook Datasets and Private Chrome, Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures

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I posted an earlier draft of this on October 4.

The Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) Facebook group is in the midst of its October moneybomb to scare McCain fundraising drive, with a goal of raising $15K by October 15th to push the group’s total to $40K.  It’s an ambitious goal; while the group has over 760,000 members (up 40,000 since the last time I checked a few weeks ago), nobody knows how many follow the discussion board actively.  So please, if you’re an Obama supporter, get involved and help out!

As calibration, here’s how some well-know progressive blogs did with their September fundraising.  It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, because they’re raising money for Congressional elections, but it’s still a real eye-opener.   (See the first comment for details and sources.)

• myDD originally set a goal of getting to 120 donors and $10,000 raised via their Road To 60 ActBlue page, and beat it handily: 136 donors as of the end of September, and somewhere around $13,000, for an average of about $90/donor.
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