I just noticed a post on Mobileactive.org on how technology was used by different organizations to follow the 2011 presidential elections in Liberia. The article focuses on the differences between election monitoring and crowd sourcing and also give some insights in the specific challenges that the organizers were faced with in Liberia. It’s worth reading: Technology in the 2011 Liberian elections: mobiles, monitoring and mapping
Those of you who follow the elections in Liberia have probably heard about the violent incident that took place in Monrovia last Monday. A local paper has an interesting article on how the simultaneous outage of one of Liberia’s two mobile phone networks affected people who were close to the riot.
For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com. Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi: After all, Ushahidi is just the technical platform and it is the responsibility of others to feed the system information, but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information.
Liberians will go to the polls on 11 October 2011 to vote for a new house of representative, a new senate and – most importantly – they’ll decide who will be the president for the next six years. Ushahidi has set up a website to monitor the elections.
Given how obsessed everyone was with how social media helped elect Barack Obama, I’m surprised that I haven’t read more reviews of this book: “Yes We Did – An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand” by Rahaf Harfoush, which gives an excellent overview over how the Obama campaign used social media to mobilize people to donate time and money. Harfoush (@rahafharfoush) was a volunteer with Obama’s new media team. She describes the different tools that the campaign used[...]
As mentioned in an earlier post about the Germany will have general elections at the end of September. As a result some interesting web applications are appearing on the web, geared at trying to help voters with their decision. Germany’s most respected political magazine, “Der Spiegel”, is trying to make abstract political platforms tangible through a “web soap-opera” called ”Zeit der Entscheidung” (Decision Time). Each webisodes lasts for 15 minutes before the viewer is asked for his party preference. Then, the[...]
Before every general election in Germanythe “Federal Institute for Political Education” (bpb) releases the “Elect-o-Meter” (Wahl-O-Mat) a simply web-application that asks your opinion on current political issues and then compares your answer with the party platforms. With general elections only three weeks away, the new version of the Wahl-O-Mat was released on Friday – and this time even in English. If you ever wondered whom you vote for if you were German – try the “Elect-O-Meter“. Missed chance for social[...]
