original version based on suggestions from Myrna the Minx (in email), Allison Fine and Nancy Scola in Twitter: An Antidote to Election Day Woes?, and Liza Sabater's Five ways to guerrilla broadcast with your cell phone, with additional contributions from Jon Pincus. Please see the discussion threads at the bottom of the page -- and join in!

To be used for Twitter hashtags, photos, videos, blog posts, abbreviations in SMSs, and t-shirts.

Tags

Location

Simple location information: a zip code

The easiest way to provide a location is to include the zip code of the voter's registration (or polling place)

Precise information (for experts)

The location the rest of the message refers to

[state] + [first four letters of the county] + [precinct, if known]

So, in downtown Cleveland, for example, the hashtag would be #OHCuya07

Questions:

1) how to encode state-wide information?
2) special case college campuses?

Incident type

Use one of these codes when reporting information about something happening at a location. Note: EIRS has a richer taxonomy (see the "incident type" pull-down here); should we adopt that?

vmm -- voting machine malfunction
wait -- current waiting time (in minutes)
hava -- accessibility (Help America Vote Act) issue
extend -- polling times extended (with new time)
help -- help wanted (typically for investigation)
??? -- fraudulent registrations

Alert type

Use one of these codes when sending out an alert.

media -- a story!
blog -- something for the bloggers
gtwo -- short for "get the word out", a message that needs to go out

Party information

If the incident applies to voters of a particular party, or the alert is intended for supporters of a particular party

dem
rep
green
lib
const
...

Source

When relaying information from a trusted source. These should be used very sparingly but could be useful as backup channels for emergencies.

sos -- Secretary of State.
camp -- a campaign
rov -- registrar of voters

Examples

coming soon ...

Who else should we involve?

A standard's a lot more useful if a lot groups standardize on it. For that to happen, they need to be aware of it -- and it needs to meet their needs. So we should get key players involved as early as possible, ideally in the design stage.

Election protection/voting rights monitoring organizations

866-OUR-VOTE hotline
Election protection wiki
VerifiedVoting/EIRS
Project Vote
Common Cause's "Protect the Vote"
Voter Action
Just Vote '08

Government

Secretaries of State (NASS)

Feet on the street/ community groups

Color of Change
People for the American Way's "Right to Vote"

Media

we want it to be useful for bloggers, journalists, and other media types as well ...

Technology providers

If we get broad involvement on this, we'll be putting a very heavy load on systems -- and potentially using them in ways they weren't designed for. How to make everything work as smoothly as possibly? Partnering with tech companies whose stuff we're using could be very helpful: letting them know what we're doing, getting their feedback on how to do it better, jointly estimating likely load.

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