Vote Report Wins the Golden Dot Award
Yesterday I went to the Politics Online Conference in Washington D.C. for the Golen Dot Award. Since so many of my friends ask "What is that?", I'm going to talk a bit about the project and the award itself. I will then post a follow-up blog on my experience yesterday in more detail.
The award is the Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University. Every year, they organize the PoliticsOnline Conference in Washinton D.C. and announce the best internet projects related to politics. This year, our project, the TweeterVoteReport and Inauguration Report, won the Best Mashup category.
The projects, VoteReport and InaugurationReport, are Crowdsourcing Political Journalism projects. In plain English, it's using social network technology and allows the public to document political events. During last year's election and the inauguration in Jan, we use the same technology and allow people to share their experience. The result is huge amount of data (text report, photo, audio, video) with geo location information. We collect data through Twitter, SMS, Filckr, Youtube, iPhone and Android. We then open up this stream of data and allow any media outlet to mashup in anyway they want. The project is completly open-source. The project was organized by NPR, Tech President, American Univeristy and CBS News. There are over 20 developers participated in these projects, including Sanford Dickert from Contagious Conversations, Dave Troy from TwitterVision, Andrew Turner from GeoCommons, Sze Wong from Zerion Software, and Nathan Freitas. Full contributor list of the vote report project can be found here.
You can read more about the projects in my pervious blogs or the following links:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/vote-report-wins-golden-dot
http://afine2.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/twitter-vote-report-goes-to-india/
http://blog.twittervotereport.com/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2009/01/inauguration_report_is_live.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99395388
http://www.inaugurationreport.com/
Like I said on the Panel yesterday, it's been a great honor working on this project. From both the social data collection and development collaboration perspectives, this project was a great success.
