Many Eyes on the Economic Stimulus: What Will They See?

ProPublica, a non-profit group funded by foundations and led by mainstream journalists to produce independent investigative work, has taken a big step into citizen reporting. The move is full of promise–and some peril.

The group’s “Adopt a Stimulus Project” invites volunteers to report in their own neighborhoods projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act–that’s the Obama administration’s plan to invest billions into a wide range of projects in order to keep people working and move federal dollars into the private economy.

The AARA has been portrayed as both an engine of economic growth and a pork-laden boondoggle. ProPublica is enlisting citizens to provide surveillance.

How it works:

• Citizens go to the ProPublica website and “adopt” a nearby ARRA project
• They visit the actual job site, gathering facts and observations and delivering them to ProPublica’s staff of veteran journalists
• ProPublica’s team uses the reportage to develop ARRA accountability stories for local and national audiences.

The need for well-informed analysis of such a huge government spending program is obvious. The administration’s “transparent” recovery.gov effort provides a positive spin. Opposition reports deride the effort.  Balanced assessments are few.

The Promise The volunteers can conduct far more primary field reporting than even the best-funded newsrooms. This is classic crowd-sourcing, where armies of people can [presumably] produce more value and intelligence than teams of professionals.

The Peril Raw reportage of uneven quality and filtered inevitably through a single active citizen’s bias needs intensive fact-checking, additional reporting and contexualizing if it’s to serve the public properly. Can ProPublica provide this for hundreds of ARRA projects? The promise of crowd-sourcing is scalability–that an effort can benefit from the imput of hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. But if a huge amount of granular reportage still needs to be filtered though experienced journalists’ brains bit by bit. . .well, that’s unlikely to scale to a project as ambitious as tracking the ARRA.

The Context Take a look at this excellent Washington Post report that appeared recently, looking at one of the first Washington, D.C.-area ARRA projects. In addition to checking out the site and tallying jobs vs. spending, the reporter [interest revealed: my former colleague and pal Steve Hendrix] looked at how the workers who were getting hired spent the money. Turns out it’s not on driving economic growth. Many are simply paying off debts. Useful and vital? Yes. Stimulative? Not so much.

The Post piece is subtle, ambitious–and expensive–professional reporting, devoted to a single ARRA project in a single town. Can a partially crowd-sourced plan deliver similar value?

We’ll see. Meantime, it’s encouraging that ProPublica is undertaking something that will help answer the question.

My Wrongest Post of 2008: A Transparent Disaster

I take pride in not only admitting mistakes, but making them. In fact, I carry this old [paper!] news clipping in my wallet:

“If you’re not failing enough, you’re not trying hard enough,” said Richard Holden, product manager for Google’s Adwords service. . .”The stigma [for failure] is less [at Google] because we staff projects leanly and encourage them to just move, move, move. If it doesn’t work, move on.”

And so I’m here to call direct attention to my most dead-from-the-neck-up incorrect, thoroughly wrong-headed post of 2008: “Election08: A Transparent Disaster.”

In it I argued that, due to the proliferation of social media tools that allow people to create and publish videos, pictures and brief text reports of goings-on at the polls on election day, the election would collapse under the weight of all that citizen reportage. It would tie up results in some places for weeks, I argued.

I forecast this with the nuanced prose style I have been honing my entire life. Wrote I:

I predict a paralyzing info hell as a rickety, distributed, incoherent, often incompetent, long-invisible voting system is exposed to the harsh light of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, iReports, youReports, themReports, cell photos, almost-real-time blog postings and whatever self-interested data-motes are broadcast by, um, legit journalists on the national networks on TV and online.

I predict legal intervention, litigation and a long postponement of official results.

As anyone who has not been sequestered in a warehouse full of Minnesota ballots for the past two months knows, none of the above came to pass. Not even close.

The two biggest efforts, in fact, suggest that the proliferation of those tools made the election more efficient, not less.

Problems were captured and reported on by CNN. But in many cases it appears the problems were reported in local election officials who actually may have responded to correct, control or at least explain the problems.

Ditto a big effort called Twitter Vote Report, an initiative sponsored by a bunch of large (though mostly progressive) organizations.

In no case could I find an example of the reports being used to dispute  results. I remain surprised. After so many reports of voter intimidation and official incompetence in 2000 in Florida, I couldn’t imagine how those alleged events would not have been captured in real time and the data used to litigate close elections.

Even the recount of the extremely close Senate election between comedians Norm Coleman and Al Franken has been handled with such admirable transparency that no question of election day mischief has come into play.

So: Mea culpa. Mea freakin’ culpa. I was wrong.

I would vouch that I’ll be careful not to repeat that kind of transparent blogging disaster in 2009. But that itself would be another blatant mistake.

After all, if I don’t fail enough, that would mean I’m not trying hard enough.

Transparent Disaster, Cont’d

Yesterday I observed that today’s election will be the first example of a transparent voting process, one exposed to the light of day by uncountable acts of “citizen journalism”–reports by members of the public of problems at the polls.

I predicted, somewhat boldly, that so many reports of malfeasance, misbehavior and mischief would surface via the social web that the entire process–and some outcomes–will be disputed for. . .a long time. Transparency cuts both ways, I argued.

“A freaking mess” is how I believe I described the likely result.

Last night, Ali Velshi of CNN baldly reported that the network had already received 30,000 reports of problems at the polls. He said the network had staff to vet the reports and follow up with election officials. Good luck with that, as they say.

Maybe none of this content will be seized upon by partisans and used to dispute election results.

Maybe the campaigns, from President to Congressional to way down the ticket, won’t be mining all this citizen-generated data to support their legal challenges.

Maybe election officials won’t be stymied by questions of what’s a legit problem and what’s not.

Maybe the political persuasion of the Secretaries of State will have no bearing on these adjudications.

And maybe Bob Barr will be elected President today.

Hey, you never know. It’s been a crazy season.

I’ll be paying attention to the action throughout the day. Meantime, I offer a few links to some of the most prominent poll-monitoring efforts. Have a problem at the polls? Report it to all of ‘em!

Election Protection: A lawyer-led, non-partisan clearinghouse of allegations of voting irregularities

Twitter #VoteReports: Live Tweets from people who have just voted, plus lots of issue/candidate spammery. Also Twiter Vote Report, which aggregates on various databases, including a map

CNN Voter Hotline to report problems; CNN citizen iReports

PBS/YouTube Video Your Vote

RedState’s blog aggregating reports of questionable voting behavior

HuffingtonPost’s “Voting Problems” content aggregation page

Current TV’s aggregation of poll problem news and project with Digg

Common Cause’s Protect the Vote phone and online report service

TVOne’s collection of viewer reports of problems at the polls

Election08: A Transparent Disaster?

One of the central concepts behind the social web is transparency: Instant networked communications allow virtually anybody see whatever they want.

This has not escaped the attention of the two Presidential campaigns. And tomorrow’s public exercise in democracy will become the first example of a massively transparent election.

Voter fraud, voter intimidation, poll conditions, wait times, machine failures, on-the-spot partisan interventions, even get-out-the-vote actions will all be recorded, uploaded and available for all to see.

I predict a paralyzing info hell as a rickety, distributed, incoherent, often incompetent, long-invisible voting system is exposed to the harsh light of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, iReports, youReports, themReports, cell photos, almost-real-time blog postings and whatever self-interested data-motes are broadcast by, um, legit journalists on the national networks on TV and online.

I predict legal intervention, litigation and a long postponement of official results.

Let me say I believe a transparent democratic process is the only kind worth having. Now that we have [primitive] tools to see behind the curtain [well, not behind that curtain] we must use them. And celebrate the moment they represent.

But the infrastructure to manage and adjudicate all this input does not exist. We are in for an unprecedented amount of citizen journalism in ten thousand “newsrooms” with no editors. This will result in massive incidents of unintended consequences. They will make hanging chads look like sweet, slightly comic anachronisms.

• How could any self-respecting partisan not collect and broadcast whatever scraps of voting data might help his or her cause?
• How can election officials possibly figure out which reports represent legit matters of concern and which are meaningless? How can they detect citizen reporting fraud?
• How on earth can anyone figure out what to do with it all?
• How can they do it in a timely fashion?
• How can the media responsibly resist broadcasting the most egregious examples of whatever plebiscitic sins they gather?
• How can election officials safely ignore it all in the name of expediency and subject themselves to charges that they are not upholding the integrity of a process they are sworn to defend?
• And how [therefore] can we avoid a real-time, life-or-death extended battle waged by the “losing” parties–not just for the Presidency, but for the Senate, the House, Governors and thousands of local elections across the country?

I’ll be watching results on election night–not just on John King’s Magic Map but across the social web. I won’t be able to keep up with it. I won’t have a clue how to feel about it other than baffled.

This will be an extraordinary moment in the history of democracy.

And it will be a freaking mess.