We’re very proud to have been featured on both KMSP and WCCO’s evening newscasts recently, talking about My Yard Our Message and I Approve This Message. Here are clips from both appearances.

WCCO:

KMSP:

Yesterday was the deadline for submitting sign designs to My Yard Our Message. We got a ton of signs over the last few days, putting us just shy of 300 signs total. We’re very happy with that number, and the quality of some of the submissions.

This morning I turned the site off for a little while to turn the voting on. Voting is now running and as of this writing, there are already 1100 votes in the past hour and a half! To vote, we ask you to consider whether or not you’d put the given sign in your front yard.

The site is using the django-voting module to handle voting, but I’ve modified it a bit. Instead of digg or reddit-style voting, where a vote up counts for +1, and a vote down counts for +1, a vote down doesn’t negatively impact the vote count. This relates directly to the question, you deciding not to put the sign in your yard doesn’t cancel out someone else deciding to put it in their yard. In this sense, voting “no” doesn’t impact a sign, but it does allow a voter to know they’ve already made up their mind on the sign. But unlike the ballot box, voters can change their mind through the end of our voting period.

Additionally, the order of the signs on the site has been randomized in an attempt to give each sign a fair shake. Odds are signs that are closer to the front of the order may see more votes than those at the end, so the randomziation is unique for each user. The randomization that I see will not be the same as another user. Additionally, voters who view signs anonymously will see a different randomization each day. This is achieved by using each user’s ID for the random seed, or the day of the year for anonymous users.

While it would be great if anonymous users could vote, even with proper protections in place, it is possible the vote could be hijacked by someone with a lot of friends to vote for them. To prevent this, users are required to have an account to vote. We’ve made it really easy to create an account, all that’s needed is an email address. I’m still working on the verification mechanism, so users who sign up today or tomorrow won’t get a verification message from us until then. Giving an email address logs users in immediately, so they can vote right away, but if they don’t eventually verify the email address, we’ll remove their votes.

We recently launched My Yard Our Message, a project that asks you to design yard signs, vote on them, and display them in your yard. The project is open for your designs any time before the end of June. We have a design template for making the signs as easy as possible.  Mnartists.org is one of the project sponsors along with the Walker Art Center and has a great article about project.

I also posted some of the tech details on how the website was built and the Facebook App we’ve built to show the signs on profiles and pages.

So far we have 47 signs submitted in the project. Here is just a sample of them:

Use your Superpowers, VOTE!
by Jane Rainwater

Ecology Flag
by Christy Sayre

Ugly partisanship
by Emmet Byrne

Convention
by Andy Pressman