“Look for more social media at the Republican convention, meanwhile, thanks to a “citizen journalism” outfit called The UpTake.

“The video-centric independent-journalism group has figured out a way to anoint anyone with the right kind of cell phone as a kind of video correspondent, with footage streaming live on the UpTake site at theuptake.org.

“The UpTake, meanwhile, is helping a local coalition of arts, media and education groups in a Web effort called The UnConvention. That site has solicited videos from anyone with a compelling political message in a project it’s calling “I Approve This Message.” Get details at theunconvention.com.”

via Pioneer Press

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.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — This city near the top of the world has a distinguished history of hosting summit meetings. Presidents, prime ministers and premiers have come here to discuss their differences and chart earth’s future.

Yet mere planets were beneath the concern of the nine leaders — warlords, religious crusaders, industrial tycoons, freedom fighters, university dons and banking moguls — who temporarily set aside their differences last week and gathered here under a banner of peace. After all, they had an entire galaxy to consider.

Of course that galaxy does not really exist. Yet for the more than 200,000 players of the science-fiction game Eve Online; for the company here that created it, CCP; indeed for the broader concept of how companies relate to their customers, the inaugural meeting of the Council of Stellar Management was a watershed in the evolution of online democracy.
Seth Schiesel
Face to Face: A Council of Online Gamers
NYT
Published: June 28, 2008

And you should too.

Run, don’t walk to http://youtube.com/watch?v=R_5VCBsAXDY to approve this message. See http://www.theunconvention.com for how to enter and play.

“Ron Paul’s campaign is planning an event at a “large venue” with a “sizable” crowd Sept. 2 — the Tuesday of convention week — in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area a couple of miles from the convention site.

“Paul spokesman Jesse Benton confirms this is certainly in the works but details are being worked out and not yet finalized. He wouldn’t divulge the specific location because contracts have not yet been signed, though this report indicates Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota.
First Read

via Frank Rich, NYT

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

I mentioned in our last steering committee meeting that it is possible to access the internet with the city-wide “USI Wireless” network in Minneapolis, using a UMN x.500 account. If you have an email in the form of “xxx@umn.edu” then you likely have an x.500 account.

The network is sometimes called “Minneapolis Public Wireless” or “USI Public Wireless”, or, or, or…;

Here are the details, posted on the Minneapolis Art on Wheels Blog.

Here’s a video of our first outing, thanks to Tyler Hallett…

Karl Rove, former Deputy Chief of Staff to President Bush, is now columnist for Newsweek. This week, he offers some tips on what he calls “the Dem’s knife fight”:

Conventions are elaborate made-for-TV productions. We live in a culture of the visual. Every moment and every event should be scripted. The media will complain about it, but think through what messages you want and when you want them. This script must be visually powerful and interesting enough to keep the cameras on your candidate and not somewhere else. Make the spectacle personal. The Al and Tipper Gore kiss, for instance, did him a lot of good. And be sure to provide fresh content all the time. In the era of cable TV, talk radio, the blogosphere and YouTube, someone is watching and talking all the time. If you’re not pressing content into all available channels, someone else will.

(emphasis added)

This is a confirmation of one of the core beliefs of the The UnConvention: the scripted nature of the conventions is meant to guide people into a particular narrative. At this point it seems likely the Republican Convention will be the rehearsed, scripted event, since the Republican Nominee is already known to be John McCain. (The Democratic Convention on the other hand, is anyone’s guess.)

The second point is that Rove points out that if the scripted convention doesn’t fill all the voids of media coverage, someone else will. And, of course, The UnConvention is hoping for a few voids that we will fill in a much more constructive way than a scripted convention could.