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.

Crowdsourcing Crime: UCrime.com

Geographic visualizations of crime data are already old hat. At least since 2005, when peerless journogeek Adrian Holovaty created chicagocrime.org, people have been mashing up public crime data with various maps to illustrate where, in a manner of speaking, the bodies are buried. [Chicagocrime.org has since been swept into Holovaty's latest adventure, Everyblock.com.]

UCrime.com, a Baltimore startup launched last month, takes crime mashups to college, providing visual reports on incidents on over 100 college campuses. The picture is not always pretty. Here is a snapshot of the last six months of mischief that’s taken place at the University of Maryland at College Park, the school my son will be attending in the fall:

Looks like those crazy Terps have a blast on campus, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, take a look at Brigham Young. Crime? Not so much.

The icons are kind of humorous (unless of course you’re the victim of one of the incidents). A spray can shows malicious destruction of property, a moneybag is theft, a fist a simple assault. Handcuffs show a successful collar. Users can choose to view all crimes or just, say, burglaries.

While the site is just launched, it promises to introduce a couple of social media features. It appears students can join a sort of digital neighborhood watch and report crimes. Users can “comment” on specific incidents or collaborate like junior crimesolvers.

Crowdsourced crime reports, “reviews” of certain incidents, collective responses to crime. . .Call me a worrywart, but if I were running this site I’d want to have a skilled moderator–and an even more skilled lawyer on retainer.

It’s worth noting that there’s nothing new to the information here. Campus newspapers always run crime reports. Local cop agencies make this material public. UCrime simply collects the information over time, tags it by type and connects the crimes with geography.

But it’s a good illustration of the power of even a very simple data visualization. The medium transforms a public datastream into a compelling story about a community and what goes on there.

Of course, that story is misleading. Three top-of-the-head reasons:

• A compact campus with a given level of crime looks more crime-dense than a spread-out one.
• The visualization does not take into account the size of a student body–”there’s no denominator,” as they say in applied stats class.
• A quick glance makes it hard to distinguish a campus where there are dozens of open-container violations from one with a lot of gunpoint robberies.

In the end, perhaps the most valuable service is the one that lets students get alerts–via mobile phone, if they like–of crimes occurring within a specified chunk of geography. It’s good to know two kids just had their laptops taken form a certain dorm, for instance.

Of course, there’s nothing keeping a parent from signing up for this service too.

Yikes. What dorm is my kid staying in this fall again?

User-generated litigation

The inherent fairness of wisdom-of-the-crowds ratings matters very little when applied to things like recipes, R&B songs, videos, restaurants or blog entries (Digg this entry, folks, please!).

When public opinions are gathered about lawyers, however, things get a little stickier.

Witness Browne v. Avvo, Inc.

Avvo is a web 2.0 site that invites users to rank lawyers. Browne is John Henry Browne, a Seattle attorney who was ranked by Avvo. I’m guessing you know where this story is headed.

Bottom line: Browne’s class-action suit against Avvo’s CEO and 25 “John Does” was thrown out. Frankly I don’t want to get into much detail here, because I don’t need Browne or any individual so situated to sue my puny butt. But read David Ardia’s summary of the Browne v. Avvo on the website of the Citizen Media Law Project for all the details.

I will, however, share this one ripe bit of commentary from U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik, who granted the defendants’ dismissal of the suit:

[P]laintiffs Browne and Wenokur want to make a federal case out of the number [[the rating published by Avvo--cs]] assigned to them because (a) it could harm their reputation, (b) it could cost them customers/fees, or (c) it could mislead the lawyer-hiring public into retaining poor lawyers or bypassing better lawyers. To the extent that their lawsuit has focused a spotlight on how ludicrous the rating of attorneys (and judges) has become, more power to them. To the extent that they seek to prevent the dissemination of opinions regarding attorneys and judges, however, the First Amendment precludes their cause of action.

If there’s been a more astute observation about the practice of aggregating public opinion to provide consumer guidance, I’ve yet to read it. It’s a dumb practice. And it’s pointless to fight it.

[Conflict-of-interest note: CMLP's David Ardia is a former attorney for my ex-employer, the Washington Post. On several occasions he managed to keep stories I edited on the proper side of the law.]