I’ve put together two short screencasts about a neat election resource that I help run called “Voter Guide Toolkit.” We’re recruiting a campaign leader, so I created two short screencasts to help inform the great applicants that we’ve received so far. I think they came out pretty well, so I thought that some of my readers would also be interested in how we plan to collect and present voting information to 10 million voters. You’ need to flash to view these files, and you’ll have to click twice to start the videos.
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Collecting candidate information |
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1. technology, 2. politics democracy, Election 08, videos
It’s an exciting time for technology+politics in general, and for me in particular. I am a volunteer manager of e-thePeople.org, and I am in charge of hiring a Campaign Leader for our Voter Guide Toolkit project. It’s an exciting project, and the job is quite well-compensated as non-profits go. We’re hitting stride for the project: we already have $175k in repeat customers ready to sign up and a major site redesign underway. Here’s a short (e.g., 50 sec) video and a brief excerpt from the entire job description
What if every voter had the tools to cast an informed vote?
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=HFosKG7mupg[/youtube]
The Job: Leading a nonpartisan initiative to educate millions of voters for the 2008 election, working in collaboration with leading media and advocacy organizations.
…
The Right Candidate: You are entrepreneurial and not afraid to take a chance on an unconventional but high-impact idea. You are politically aware and engaged, and are as committed to improving the way the whole system works as you are to any one particular cause or point of view. You have approximately 2-5 years of sales, marketing, political campaign, political organizing, or project management experience. You are friendly and comfortable working with clients, but also capable of managing expectations and saying “no” when necessary; you are organized and good at handling the occasional crisis. You are interested in the way technology is changing business, society and the government.
If I have your email address, you should expect to get an email about this too. Please help distribute the job opportunity widely!
1. technology, 2. politics democracy, Election 08, videos
I am finally back in the US. After three back-to-back sleepless nights as a global data cruncher, I have the final results of the first-ever European-wide deliberative poll. I’ll have more to say about deliberative polls and this project, but for now, here is a short summary of what we did and what the results are.
What we did:
For the first time ever, a scientific microcosm of Europe was gathered to a single place, the European Parliament building in Brussels, to deliberate in 22 languages about key issues facing the future of the EU and its member states. The participants became dramatically more informed about key issues and changed their views. Participants from the 12 new member countries had different starting points in their opinions but generally changed their opinions more, growing closer in their views to those from the older member states. Over a long weekend, the participants deliberated about economic, social and foreign policy, reflecting on “Europe in the World.”
The results:
* Participants were more likely to support for sacrifices for pensions after deliberation than before
* They were less likely to support for enlargement, mostly coming from new member states learning the reasons against enlargement old member states
* In general, participants from new member states changed more and changed towards old member states
* Very significant knowledge gains
* Participants were more educated than non-participants and in general had small but statistically significant difference in attitude and other measures
Here’s a great press release that has a lot of juicy details:
http://www.tomorrowseurope.eu/spip.php?article169
On that site, you can also find video and other details.
There has also been a fair amount of press too. Here are two examples:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2193515,00.html#article_continue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21351249/
2. politics academia, democracy, polling
I found this video in a post titled “My life in a nutshell.” Oh, too true!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIQE8t7PBbk[/youtube]
2. politics democracy, society, videos
My brother forwarded two valuable political resources: politifact.com and www.factcheck.org. The first is especially engaging in my opinion. With a truth-o-meter, they verify that “Obama girl’s” is correct to say ‘At least Obama didn’t marry his cousin,” as Giuliani did.’ However, Guiliani is completely wrong to accuse the democrats of socializing medicine and mostly wrong in asserting that they are “tripping over themselves” to raise taxes between “20 and 30 percent.”
I find three aspects make these resources valuable: (1) they can develop a track record of credibility; (2) people are quite good at discerning the truth when given all the facts (in contrast to a one-sided political statement) and (3) they can hold politicians accountable for what they say. Unfortunately, that third point is undermined by the fact that these sites primarily reach highly educated and engaged voters. They can do little to put fire to feet of mass campaigns of slander like “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”
By the way, my mom sent me a link to the email discovery issue yesterday and my friend Nathaniel has been the source of several posts. If you find something interesting, send it to me! (mike [at] weiksner [dot] com). Also, until I figure out a better system I’m going to cross-post relevant articles on e-thepeople (like this current one) and on my obama blog. I consider weiksner.com the main place for me to post my ideas, but e-thepeople is a better place for public discussion. Still working out the obama blog thing.
2. politics democracy, Election 08, meta
Yahoo has launched a neat site that allows you to compare video responses of the Democratic candidates. Check it out here:
http://debates.news.yahoo.com/
Unlike the one I wrote about yesterday, this one is highly produced. Charlie Rose asks the traditional questions and Bill Maher challenges the candidates with nontraditional ones. You can make video playlists by selecting the issues and candidates you want to see.
I find it ironic that they called a “mashup.” It’s really nothing of the sort. It’s professionally produced programming, not an amateur hodgepodge put together from different sources. I like it, but I still like ExpertVoter.org better.
2. politics democracy, Election 08, follow up, interactive, videos
While there has been a lot of attention of the recent YouTube/CNN debates, where citizens got to upload videos of themselves asking question, I think youtube may even have a greater impact in a less flashy way: video voter guides. Why? ExpertVoter.org shows 40 second clips from anywhere - interview, debate, web site and they are terrific summaries of the candidates positions.
The site itself is “ghetto”–there aren’t any flashy bells and whistles. As you can see in this screenshot, it’s just a grid of issues and candidates
But the editor has done a good job of picking a single good video to watch in each square. Sure, I’d love to be able to create a quick playlist by candidate or issue. But even as it is, this resource is one you can use. I wonder if there is a way to add rebuttals, citizen comments, etc., too, although you might argue that those elements would only clutter the very concise summary that this service offers.
Go spend some time there now! Why waste 90 minutes to watch an entire debate on TV when you learn what you need in 20 minutes here?
2. politics democracy, Election 08, interactive, videos
SLOPS were originally “self-selected listener opinion polls” and now often refer to today’s ubiquitous “self-selected online polls.” As I found out in today’s roundup on techpresident.com, Ron Paul’s supporters are defrauding every SLOP that they can find. They’ve been excluded from one straw poll for their antics, and succeeded in winning a different poll about the latest republican debate based on text-message voting. At e-thePeople.org, we’ve had similar problems with freerepublic.com (”freeps!”) and other libertarians making sure that they were more than adequately represented in our polls.
Now, my advisor at Stanford Jim Fishkin loves to lampoon this old chestnut. He vigorously believes that researchers should control the public opinion process, through techniques like random sampling and moderated discussion. I certainly think that there is a place for his deliberative polling enterprise, but I don’t find it in opposition to SLOPs.
I think SLOPs have an important but different role to play. When I presented at the SXSW conference, I asked for a show of hands for who was republican. Not one of the 100 or so people in the audience raised their hands. SLOPs can give a powerful sense of “who’s in the room,” but only when we have adequate understanding of how the counting is done and what room we are talking about.
Which brings me back to the irony of Paul’s supporters and other free marketers that abuse the rules and intentions of these SLOPs. Aren’t they just proving why rules and regulations are needed to avoid anarchy?
1. technology, 2. politics academia, democracy, polling