Announcing… – Page 5 – nathan's open ideals

Externally Visualizing TwitterVoteReport.com

You might have seen a previous post about the VoteReport for Android I developed. This was done as part of the twittervotereport.com effort, which is aiming to use a variety of communication tools (sms, iphones, g1’s, plain old phone lines) along with open standards and mashup technologies to create an effective tool for tracking problems (and successes!) at the polls on November 4th.

One of the exciting aspects of this project is that the primary visionaries, architects and developers committed early on to opening up the data they are collecting, providing a variety of feeds to access the incoming reports:

Here are the various ways that you can access the data collected by Twitter Vote Report, as detailed by our Andrew Turner:

* OpenSearch – http://votereport.us/opensearch.xml
This is the OpenSearch description document that outlines all of the feeds and various filters that you can use when getting to the data.
* KML – http://votereport.us/reports.kml
Getting the reports.kml will give a Network Link – this is useful for GoogleEarth and other KML clients to automatically update every 60 seconds with new reports.
* GeoRSS-Atom – http://votereport.us/reports.atom
Just want to subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader, this feed is useful for getting updates.
* GeoJSON – http://votereport.us/reports.json
JSON is super nice for doing client-side mashups and visualization. This is what the Vote Report Map itself is using. It includes a lot of information for each report, including reporter, icon, location

I haven’t been involved in the backend development of the TVR system because a) I couldn’t fully commit to the herculean effort they’ve made and b) much of it is implemented in Ruby on Rails, a platform which I am not that familiar with. However, I had a few hours today and decided to become a consumer of the data feeds (specifically GeoJSON) they have provided to implement a service using Java/JSP. My aim was to provide an alternate system for browsing the reports and visualizing them, as well, and perhaps just act as a backup repository.

Thus, I’ve created TVR on OpenIdeals – the same data as what you’ll get on the main twittervotereport site, but with some different tools for looking through it and for sharing it on your blog.

I also wanted to provide some other options for creating widgets out of the data. Here’s an example of a dynamically updating widget you can create that displays the last 25 reports from Virginia:

Here’s a view of anyone having a bad experience at the pools:

That’s about it. Check out the site and please tomorrow make sure you 1) VOTE and 2) report how your vote went using the TVR Reporting Tools.

VoteReport for Android 0.9.4

I hate calling things 1.0, so I didn’t – VoteReport for Android 0.9.4 is released and available in the Android Marketplace (like the iPhone App Store). If you have a T-Mobile G1, just open the Market application and search for “votereport” or simply browse under the Productivity category. You can also download it direct at: http://openideals.com/android/VoteReport.apk (and you don’t even have to jailbreak anything!).

view full set slideshow

The application is free to download, obviously. The code will be shortly, as well. All in all the entire effort took < 10 hours, albeit with lots of prep and design inherited from the iPhone app effort.

What is this mysterious TwitterVoteReport project? Read on…

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.

I am hoping to make some improvements on it in the coming day or two, but know there are more important tasks at hand, and just wanted to makes sure the core functionality was out there.

Now get out there and let’s keep this election clean!

Spread the Word: 2008 Nonprofit Software Dev Summit

My good friend Gunner of Aspiration Tech is putting together what should be a great event. Gunner is one of the best session facilitators, activist trainers and geek wranglers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and learning from. Hope to see you there…

Aspiration is organizing an extremely exciting event in November, and we’re trying to get the most diverse audience we can possibly get together.

The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit is shaping up to be a magical convergence of folks creating technology for social change. I invite you and anyone you know who might be interested to join us.

And please help us spread the word!

Details: http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/devsummit08

Sessions: http://devsummit08.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title=Sessions_List

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=32187241823

I hope to see lots of you there!

thanks & peace,
gunner

Functional About Card – a better business card?

This morning, upon realizing my old business cards were mostly out of date, I decided to design a new card. I pulled up the most excellent Apple Pages and started designing away… now they have some nice built-in templates, but the problem is that you always end up with something you can’t easily manufacturer in the comfort of your own home. I’ve gone through a few sets of Moo cards, but I’ve grown weary of them a bit, as they just seem to disappear so quickly and aren’t that cheap. I looked at my stack of paper next to the printer, and noticed some index cards I had bought for recipes, D&D and perhaps a little-used Hipster PDA. In that moment, I was struck with a minor inspiration, which resulted in the work below… though its up to you to decide, of course, how productive my morning actually was.

Introducing… the Functional About Card (fāc)!
The Functional About Card (fāc) is a business card format & template that prints on 3×5 index cards in the color of your choice (Office Depot 500 pack on Recycled Paper for $2.89). The goal was to create a business card that can be easily produced on demand with a home printer, and is actually useful and functional, as opposed to the usual dead tree spam you usually get that just collect dust.

The card design is two-sided, comprised of four 2.5×3″ quadrants:

a read-only information quad providing your critical stats (name, title, email, charisma, hit points)
a writeable, line-ruled quad where recipients of your card can take notes on things you’ve said, or perhaps what others have said about you. this area can also be torn off (see ‘scoring’ info later) and used for exchanging numbers or stock tips
a visual quad for displaying geeky things like QRCodes, avatars, creative commons badgets and so on
a blank “scratchpad” quad for brainstorming, mind mapping, UML sequence diagrams or maps for meeting up later in the evening

You could optionally replace the note-taking area on the right with a maze, crossword puzzle, madlib or other small format, amusing game. Anyone you give you a card to will be delighted later when they discover that you’ve actually given them something fun to pass the time.

I’ve chosen to use the back side to display a QRCode, but if that is just way too geeky for you, feel free to put a picture of yourself, your pet, your favorite flower or historical figure (Ben Franklin!). You might also expand the right “idea napkin” area to the whole card, because admittedly, 3×2.5″ isn’t much room for a great idea.

Make sure to lightly score (with a screw driver, razor blade or exact knife) and fold the card down the middle of the long length… this way it fits nicely into wallets, pockets and other places people typically put these things. This also makes the card a bit easier to tear evenly in half, in case it needs to be used as a part of a sneaker net data transmission.

Download the template in Apple Pages, PDF and MS Word formats: FunctionalAboutCard-1.0.zip

Oh, yeah, and this template has been released under the Creative Commons By Attribution 3.0 license.

Functional About Card by Nathanial Freitas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at openideals.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://openideals.com.

So, there it is… I hope you love it, and if not, that you’ll provide some useful suggestions and improvements upon this flight of fancy.

New Documentary ponders the “Prince of Peace”

A new documentary film Prince of Peace – God of War has just been released on Cruxy and announced on The Movie Blog:

Prince of Peace – God of War is a non-sensationalized visual record of Director John Campea’s (a former evangelical Christian and minister) journey across North America, speaking with historians, professors and religious leaders about these issues. The basic question is a simple one: “Should Christians kill people?”

How did this faith, known and identified for its non-violent beliefs, go on to conduct the crusades, the inquisitions, witch hunts, and today have 87% of white evangelical Christians support President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq? How did this religion, founded by a Pacifist and known (even criticized) for non-violence, become a religion known for its aggression, war, political power and embracing of violence?

You can view a preview and download the film here on Cruxy