Print ‘n’ Read Feature: e-Hail to the Chief

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post has been providing some of the best, most persistent coverage of the use of digital media by the presidential candidates all year.

And now he’s written a big where-we’ve-been/where-Obama-goes-from here piece. Like so much important writing about technologies, e-Hail to the Chief is a lousy read on the web. And so it is my first Print ‘n’ Read ™ feature of 2009, a distinction I assign to articles about technology so valuable they are actually worth printing out on paper and reading away from the computer.

The major theme is how hard it’s going to be for Obama to use the digital media that helped get him into office to carry out the duties of that office. [I've whacked this particular mole-head many times in this blog.]

Highlights include comments from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Al Gore about the messiness of digital democracy when people don’t like what the President is doing–and organize against the very guy they supported. [Am I the only one who didn't know Gore is a "senior adviser" to Google?]

But my favorite part comes at the end, where Vargas witnesses one of the “house meetings” that the transition team’s digital wing is organizing via the web to try to make use of the hunger for civic participation they’ve created.

It’s a somehow sad scene in which regular citizens create and capture a long list of well-worn goals–health care, energy, education, etc., etc., etc.–on a big poster at the front of the room.

The effect is a lingering sense of well-intentioned impotence. It leaves you wondering how on earth you get from that to. . .change we can believe in.

Disclosure: Vargas is a former colleague of mine at the Post.

Government, the Public Interest and You.0

Today I was lucky enough to appear at a Washington forum on government, non-profits and social media.

The event was hosted by Clickability and Kick Apps, two companies that work mostly in the private sector but who, like so many in the tech world, are eyeing Washington as a center of social media innovation. [Or at least technology contracts.]

As one federal agency CIO said over lunch, “It’s Obama. Everybody knows he’s into this, and we’ve got to get up to speed.”

As usual, I learned more from listening to the others than the audience did by listening to me. Here are seven nuggets I picked up:

1. The government is innovating with social technologies more than I realized. I heard about internal knowledge sharing at the State Department, a CDC effort to collect on-the-ground intel from first responders and the DOD’s Pentagon Channel. And the EPA’s blogging program. Here’s a wiki that planks out what various federal agencies are up to with social media.

2. In prepping for the conference, I learned about The Twittering Diplomat. Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at U.S. State Department, is Tweeting away as she tours eastern Europe on a diplomatic mission. Yes, it opens Twitizens’ eyes to what a diplomat really does. What led her to do it? I have no clue. As I am writing this, she has Tweeted this:

flight departing for Armenia now–land 4:50AM

Of course, the Twitter profile could be a front, a persona created to head-fake the Iranians or something like that. I’d be delighted if this turned out to the first case of Twitter Espionage.

3. Michael Chin of Kick Apps, in his introduction, used a phrase I hadn’t heard on the 2.0 conference circuit: “multilogue”–as opposed to “monologue” or “dialogue.” I like that. I may steal it.

4. Fellow panelist and IBM marketing VP Sandy Carter described her company’s participation in an effort before the Beijing Olympics to get Chinese citizens to take cell phone images of broken stuff out on the street as a way to report problems to the government in time to spruce things up for the international media. She’s author of a new book titled The New Language of Marketing 2.0, full of case histories about this stuff.

5. Mario Armstrong, a digital guy who appears on his own web radio show Digital Spin Radio and occasionally on NPR as a technology expert, talked about a program he works on designed to get more U.S. students to graduate with engineering degrees. The program targets young kids.

Key insight: The adults designed a great-looking social media portal they thought was wonderful. The kids rejected it. Instead of retreating to the safety of a focus group, they just paid a bunch of the kids to plan the site. Armstrong showed a photo of the kids actually doing the card-sorting thing.

6. Alan Wolk, an advertising/PR strategist, talked about how the sort of persistent, minor contacts people have in social networks creates an effect like a “Seurat painting“–little points of color that, when taken together, suggest the full picture without providing every detail. I may steal that too.

7. The Voice of America, that hoary World-War-2-era government-funded broadcast service, launched a highly widgetized, user-generated-content-laden, make-a-profile-to-participate, join-our-discussion social network about the U.S. presidential election. They launched this in just two weeks.

Twittering diplomats. Two-week social media platform launches. Agency CIOs who know they have to get up to speed on social media. Head-spinning stuff.

Drinks were served afterward.

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.