Mobilizing Youth

twittervotereport.com

My friend Nathan just sent an email around about an app he built that interface's with Twittervotereport which was built by volunteers in partnership with techPresident; it turns your phone into an on-the-spot volunteer election reporting mechanism. The aggregate effect will be to visualize reporting problems around the nation in real time. Election monitoring orgs have been dreaming about this for eons!!  Here's the email from Nathan:

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Just wanted to make sure y'all knew about this: http://twittervotereport.com

I built an app for the new G1/Android phone that uses your GPS location
to accurately track where you are reporting from:
http://openideals.com/2008/10/30/votereport-for-android-094/

Twitter Vote Report is an all-volunteer network of software developers,
designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning
blog techPresident to launch this effort.  The only resources
contributed to this project are the participants’ time and expertise!
Millions of Americans will be voting this Election Day. Many of these
voters will have terrific experiences and we’d love to hear about
those.  But many voters will experience voting problems that we have
been hearing about for years: long lines, broken machines, and
registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up
on the registration rolls. Using Twitter Vote Report, voters will be
able to share their experiences and resources with one another to solve
problems quickly (e.g. “don’t come now, the line is too long”). These
messages will then be aggregated and mapped so that we can “see” voting
problems around the country in real-time.


Spread the word!

New name for Volunteer Now!

I'm considering a new name for Volunteer Now... because it seems that people instantly (and logically) compare the idea/application to what they know of existing volunteerism. It becomes a mental process of fitting the application into the volunteer ecosystem, which seems to limit, more than help. Because while "doing good in your spare time" seems initially like a form of volunteering, perhaps it's something new - or at least, different. Perhaps shifting the model around the individual, rather than to the entity being helped, makes it something unique. Maybe it's more like a neighborly good deed. Looking at it in this way also opens it up to helping an individual, in addition to an organization. Whereas calling it a 'volunteer' activity instantly leads people to think that organizations are helped, exclusively.

My best name this far is: SpareTimeMachine

What do you think?

UI for Volunteer Now

I've decided to move forward with Volunteer Now as an iPhone optimized web site versus an iPhone app. I'm thinking that it'll be portable to other phones when they have nice big browsing environments - and will also be much easier to get up and running for the proof of concept pilot. Downsides are that it'll be harder to get location information, responsiveness will suffer, UI won't be as slick, and it won't benefit from any of the iPhone-app related hubbub or integration into iTunes. So a lot of downsides, but don't think they offset the positives.

Diagram showing UI is here: