|
|
 |
|
Grog: the Green Moon Blog
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
Grog - Green Moon Blog
Nov
3
Written by:
John Dukovich
Monday, November 03, 2008 1:06 PM
I have been messing with Twitter on and off for a few months, not being really sure what to do with it. Lisa and I used it at the N-TEN conference last spring to do real-time commenting on a plenary session. It was interesting to see how others were responding to the speaker and the environment, but not sure how truly useful that was. Similarly, I plugged in during the U.S. presidential debates last month to see what other viewers were thinking. Again, interesting but also it seemed to just add to the general chatter.
Today I received an e-mail that pointed to what looks like a very practical application of Twitter: using it to report problems and issues at U.S. polling places on election day (tomorrow).
Thanks to early voting in many states, there have already been more than 80,000 calls to a voter hotline. The calls came in on the toll-free number 1.866.OUR.VOTE (1.866.687.8683). However, if they have already received 80,000 calls during early voting (during which less than 10% of citizens have voted), the phone lines could get swamped tomorrow. So, the organization (OurVoteLive.org) has made two additional technologies available for people to report problems:
The complete instructions for tweeting your issue can be found here. But here's an example tweet that I'll explain below:
@866ourvote Long line est. wait of 2hrs. Some leaving after seeing the line #22205 precinct4 #EPVA #votereport
- @866ourvote - sends the note to the 866ourvote Twitter account (required)
- #22205 - # followed by the zip code of the polling place (optional)
- precinct4 - precinct number (optional - obviously, change the number to match the precinct you are at)
- #EPVA - # followed by "EP" for election problem, followed by two-character abbreviation for your stated (e.g., Pennsylvania would be #EPPA, Ohio would be #EPOH) (required)
- #votereport - feeds your tweet to the Twitter Vote Report website (which uses a Google map to plot incidents) (optional)
Some of the above parameters are optional, but the more you provide the better results you may get. In a perfect world we would not need anything like this. However, I think it is a great application of Twitter and I will be interested to see how it all works out. I'll post a blog in a few days when the dust settles so that we can see how Twitter was used during this election.
Now, get out there and vote!
Copyright ©2009 Green Moon Solutions, LLC
Tags:
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|