Why TweetProgress?

It started with a vision, or rather, a visual forwarded by Jim Gilliam, creator of WhiteHouse2.org, Nationbuilder, and the Twitter petition site act.ly). It comes from a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Twitter use during the Iran election: “Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets” by Kovas Boguta (the last visualization in the post “Algorithmic Community Structure Detection”).

See the big blue blob on the right? That is the conservative twittersphere or as Boguta describes it: “tightly interwoven conservative twittersphere.” No where on that visualization do you see progressives and that should be troubling to progressive activists.

If progressives are going to maintain their dominance online, we have to be present everywhere, especially in powerful new social media spaces like Twitter. We’ve seen what early investment in the blogosphere got us, and what lack of investment got the right. We have to continue investing in and organizing on new technologies so that we remain ahead of the curve.

What Does the Graph Indicate?

The nodes and connections indicate the use of hashtags. The big blue blob represents the hashtag #tcot (top conservatives on twitter) which is used an average of 2,000 times per day. Before the launch of TweetProgress, the corresponding progressive hashtag #p2 (progressives 2.0) was used an average of 400 times per day (estimates based on hashtags.org searches).

That a tag is used more often than another does not prove in any meaningful way that conservatives are more organized on Twitter than progressives, but those numbers do mean something. Twitter is being used to influence media, to create and establish messaging, to connect distributed groups, and to create communication infrastructure and progressives are failing to take advantage of the opportunities Twitter creates for political activism.

Our goal is to create a more dominant progressive infrastructure on Twitter for the left.

Why Are Hashtags Important?

Hashtags are important because they allow other Twitter users – not only the people who directly follow you, but also elected officials, the media, activists and others who influence policy and conventional wisdom – to identify and categorize posts of specific interest.

Building a community around the #p2 hashtag provides an infrastructure for promoting progressive ideals and actions items.

Twitter is not the be all end all of online activism, but it is an online platform progressives need to make sure we own in the very near future. Drafting more progressives into an existing infrastructure, like the #p2 hashtag, will be the key to more successful actions and issue campaigns. We must increase our organizational efforts On Twitter to take advantage of the unique opportunities it offers. TweetProgress and the community that has sprung up around the #p2 hashtag is where progressives can begin to do that.

You can read more about the TweetProgress launch at CNN, TechPresident, and The Hill.

And for more information about who is behind TweetProgress, visit the TweetProgress About page.

So if you aren’t already on Twitter, sign-up and add yourself to TweetProgress. If you’re already on Twitter but don’t use the #p2 tag or haven’t joined TweetProgress, please do.

http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/33753/p2_takes_on_the_progressive_twitter_challenge

For those of you keeping track, my new project is Nevada New Media and the first annual NNM Summit to be held on March 7th, 2009 at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Nevada New Media is co-sponsored by the Reynolds School of Journalism and includes a great advisory board. My co-founder and partner in crime, Ed Lenert and I will be working very hard over the next few months to make sure that NNM’s first event is a great event.

Voter Suppression Wiki

The Voter Suppression Wiki serves as a directory of information on how to protect your own vote, as well as the votes of others, during this election season.  The Voter Suppression Wiki is a repository of voter suppression information created by, in true wiki fashion–YOU.  The wiki publishes action alerts, information on ways you can protect your vote, an incident tracker so you can see what’s going on across the nation, upcoming guides for the media and bloggers, and a planning and strategy section that outlines how anyone can get involved.

Twitter Vote Report is asking you to Twitter your vote and Twitter the votes of others so that data can be collected and analyzed in new and different ways. The project is working with some great partners like Common Cause, Rock the Vote, Video the Vote, and many others.

From the front page:

On November 4th 2008, millions of Americans will go to over 200,000 distinct voting locations and using different systems and machinery to vote. Some voters will have a terrific experiences, and others will experience the same problems we have been hearing about for years – long lines, broken machines, inaccurate voting rolls, and others will experience problems that we haven’t heard about before. Using either Twitter.com, iPhone, direct SMS, or our telephone hotlines, voters will have a new way to share these experiences with one another and ensure that the media and watchdog groups are aware of any problems.

As news outlets and blogs will report on Election Day stories, we are building an invaluable resource for thousands of voters to get immediate help. From questions like “where do I vote” or “how do I make sure that my rights are being upheld,” Twitter Voter Report augments these efforts by providing a new way for voters to send text messages (aka tweets) via cellphones or computers which will be aggregated and mapped so that everyone can see the Nation’s voting problems in real-time.

Imagine a nationwide web map with pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working. Collectively we will inform each other when when the lines too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know where problems exist.

Four Ways to Use VoteReport

* Twitter: include #votereport and other tags (below) to describe the scene on the ground
* SMS: Send text messages to 66937 starting with the keyword #votereport plus other hash tags (below)
* iPhone: We expect to have an iPhone App in the App Store by election day
* Phone: Call our automated system to report about conditions, using any touch-tone phone

And if you would like to talk to a human to report bad conditions you’ve observed, please call our partner 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Thanks to the generous support of my readers and an invitation from the sponsors of the Big Tent in Denver, I will be at, or at least very near, the 2008 National Democratic Convention in Denver. I can’t begin to tell you how exciting this news is for a lowly, independent blogger like me. Most of the people at the Big Tent are affiliated with organizations like BlogHer, NOW, Planned Parenthood, etc. I will do my best to represent Reno and Nevada well while I’m there. Look for my updates in the following places:

Blog posts: Reno and Its Discontents
Tweets: My Twitter page

I am still negotiating, but you may also see my blog posts on Women in Media and News and Women’s eNews.

You can also get a peek into what Viselli does during her day job by following the QuinStreet Twitter account and by becoming a fan of the QuinStreet Facebook fan page.

Other campaigns include:

• Outreach for WomenCount in support of a Presidential Commission on Women
• Boycott of the Democratic Presidential Primary Debate in Reno hosted by Fox News
• Campaign to license all presidential primary debate television coverage under Creative Commons
• Associated Press boycott over free use issues

Her blogs include:

• Reno and Its Discontents
• Clutter Love
• Reno Fabulous
• Bjorn the Houseboy