The Wardman Wire

Micah Sifry has a piece about the main stream North American media not yet seeing the potential of political Twitter, other than as a new one way communication channel. We have this problem in the UK too, most famously in the case of columnist Rachel Sylvester.

For Micah, the key difference is between a politician thinking “what can I do with this“, and a group of people asking “what can we do with this”.

Micah comments:

It’s the usage by networks of politically-attentive individuals that is far more interesting. Along with blogs, social networks and other interactive communications tools, Twitter is helping knit together real-time response and collaboration across all kinds of political issues and campaigns.

Just take what we did with Twitter Vote Report, as one salient example. In about three weeks, an all-volunteer loosely-linked network of coders, political activists and journalists came together to popularize the #votereport hashtag, get all the voter-protection groups to add it to their Election Day reporting systems, created robust reporting tools and visualization systems (including iPhone and Android apps that collected moving audio reports of people’s polling experiences), and the whole thing worked on Election Day. More than 12,000 individual reports came in, NPR, the LA Times and the NY Observer were among the mainstream outlets that used the data (which was all free for anyone to work with), and I’m sure hundreds of thousands more heard about the project because so many of the reports were flowing in via Twitter. We also pulled in dozens of volunteers who, behind the scenes, volunteered time on Election Day to monitor the incoming reports and help clean up the data so we could categorize information properly and in some case pass along urgent issues to folks in the vote-protection communities and in the press. It’s inspired an effort now in India to use the same methods for a project called Vote Report India, by the way.

Yes, he’s right.

We’re still in the wake-up phase in the UK for political twitter too, but a Tweet from @tom_watson may now be worth more raw clickthroughs than a link from leading blogs. My statistics are saying that a Tweet on @mattwardman, with around 40% of Tom Watson’s followers, generates anything between 15 and 75 clicks in the next two hours at present.

There’s a lot of potential out there. At present Tweetminster, CllrTweeps and other projects are building basic infrastructure documenting who is using Twitter. It will become far more interesting as others begin to build networks and communities, whether transient or permanent, using that information – and start to get things done.

Tags: matt bai, mattwardman, micah sifry, political twitter, twitter