• The Voter Project

last modified December 24, 2011 by tomlowenhaupt

An informed and engaged public is  the hallmark of a strong society. Here we present the sketch for The Voter Project, a civic networking effort empowered by the voter.nyc domain name-set. 

An Engaged (enraged?) Voting Machine
organic-voting-machine.jpg

(Commons photo courtesy of ihorner.) 

UK's Gordon Brown Mimics Voter Project
It's a Bandwagon!

Every citizen to have personal webpage

"Everyone in the country is to be given a personalised webpage for accessing Government services within a year as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online, Gordon Brown is to announce.­"

New York City can do better! 

 * * * Civic Innovator Opportunity * * *

o Want to take the lead on this project?
o Want to meld social media with civics?

Email Tom at info@connectingnyc.org.

Keith, on the Think Obvious blog suggests these elements to a better social network:  

  1. Freedom to post long messages that are free from censorship. 
  2. Mobile applications so people can share on the go. 
  3. A plethora of users.
  4. The ability to embed media without having to use a 3rd party service. 
  5. Security in both user accounts and privacy. 
  6. Ease of use is also important, along with a clean well laid out interface.
  7. Anonymity is a must.  People can choose to use their real names or not without violating the terms of service. 
  8. Users should have the ability to make individual posts either public to all, private to followers or private to groups. 
  9. A timeline/newsfeed that is not created using some obscure algorithm to decide what is important.  Users should see everything posted by people they follow. 
  10. Users should have the ability to opt into giving away their private information, not the other way around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

   

The .nyc TLD will arrive in 2012 and transform the Internet's capacity to address local issues. It will empower voters, neighborhoods, business, religious and civic organizations to identify issues and organize for their resolution. On this page we focus on improvements to local governance that the voter.nyc and voters.nyc domain names can make.

With Connecting.nyc Inc. having its origins in a community board resolution, and with the sorry state of local communication in the city, one of our missions is to guide .nyc's capacity to fill local communication gaps by introducing social networking technology and techniques. One of our favorite domain names for expressing some of these social networking concepts is The Voter Project.

The Voter Project's mission is to civicly empower New York City's 8,200,000 residents. It seeks to inform New Yorkers that we are but 1/10th of 1% of the world's population living within 400 square miles. And while good domain names, identity ("made in New York"), and tourist portals are highly visible and advantageous features that will arrive with the .nyc TLD, the real advantage, the great hope, is that .nyc's arrival will bring vastly improved local communication via a multi-featured civic network: think souped-up Facebook for the civicly inclined.

The Voter Project begins by setting aside the "voters.nyc" domain name-set (vote.nyc, voters.nyc and voting.nyc) for use by the city's registered voters.

Using the syntax  www.firstname-lastname.voter.nyc, a "virtual page" would be created for each registered voter. And with the voter's street address known by virtue of the traditional voter registration process, the will be populated with various local civic ­resources.

The "My Civic Page"

With the voter's home address known, items on this civic page will include:

  • Contact information of local, state, and federal elected representatives
  • The location of their local voting site
  • Candidate information
  • Identity and contact information for local civic groups
  • Tools for submitting and tracking 311 complaints and 211-type inquiries
  • GIS-maps providing identification of local civic resources
  • Matching-tools for locating like mined residents to address community opportunities and problems
  • Discussion, decision making, and collaboration tools 
  • Local resource availability via a local wiki maintained by residents

    Civic Empowerment

    In addition to the voter page, the following features and benefits arise from The Voter Project:

    • The basis for empowering a civic network between voters.nyc participants.
    • Today's social networking tools can be woven into The Voter Project to provide these  other civic advantages (thanks to  Zeynep Tufekci for inspiring the following):
      • Lower barriers to collective action via channels of organization that are meshed with traditional social interaction (and incidentally more open and harder to censor).
      • Create a public(ish) sphere where new ideas can be presented without traditional in-person social inhibitions.
      • Help strengthen neighborhoods and communities as it removes isolation by connecting people and ideas and transforming desire into community strength, activity, and political action.
      • Enables New York City and neighborhood expatriates and fans to participate in local activities.
      • A key tool for disseminating information during a crisis.
    • The potential for garnering local advertising revenue in support of civic betterment.
    • And as a means for residents to participate in the .nyc TLD's governance process.

    The Conversation and Voting

    As, or perhaps more, important than voting, is the conversation that enables a thoughtful exercise of this power. Look here for more on that aspect of The Voter Project.

    Secure Registration

    A secure registration method will assure that only active voters sign in to their voter page. For example: registered voters will be able to request, via a web page, that an activation code be sent to their home address (in the real world). Upon activation, the virtual page would be populated with various civic resources and the voter provided secure access to her/his private civic page. Voters would use privacy controls to make all or part of their Voter Page visible to family, friends, neighbors, or the general public.

    Related Pages / Resources

    Key .nyc Pages