Liminal states

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the Twitter Vote Report continues to build — Nancy Scola and Allison Fine’s excellent update from Monday already looks out of date, and as the steadily-growing partners list implies, we’re making excellent progress towards the ambitious goal of  providing national real-time feedback of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.

The environment on election day is going to be chaotic; and we’re going to be relying on everyday voters, not just Twitter experts, to report the results.  So we’re trying to keep things as simple as possible … and even with that, we know we’ll get a lot of errors.  We want to make the system as tolerant as possible.  To do that, we need to get a feel for what kind of data we’d like to see.

So I’ve set up a page on the TVR wiki called “Test data for Dave“, where anybody can contribute some examples.  The first few lines give an idea of some of the complexities we’ll have to deal with:

jdp23: #votereport #wait:90 #zip:98005 longest lines I've ever seen in Bellevue
jdp24: #votereport what is jdp23 doing?  98005
spoist: L:Wasilla, AK #votereport no lines
poiwer: ::: ##votereport
perspot: #zip90210 #votereport out of ballots
pwiersd: McCains name not on ballot #60045 #votereport
nancyscola: 11215 wait120 line is out the doort #votereport

The first two came from me, and then lots of other people started getting involved, and so the list is steadily growing.

Please help contribute as well — just click Edit, and the software will walk you through setting up an account if you don’t already have one.  It’ll only take a few minutes, and you’re doing your bit to help democracy.  Thanks!

jon