Bottom Up at NPR – Get My Vote – Platforms vs Programs
by Rob Paterson
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NPR are on a roll. Recently NPR Music, now politics. Here is a new “world”that is not simply site. It is a new platform called “Get My Vote“. Here you can add your views on what would get youir vote and you can check out and talk about other’s all under the brand of NPR.
If you look at the Cloud, you can also get a feel for how a national agenda might emerge. Imagine a politician partcipating here – could be municipal, state or national. This is what I mean by a platform. This has the potential to become a force for democracy. If not in its present form with a few tweaks it will.
This door way into the “World of Politics” is a bit like WOW. You enter as an unknown with few powers. But if you work hard here – you could become a somebody.
I think that this represents a breakthrough in thinking away from the NewsRoom knows best and the NewsRoom defines what is important and what is quality.
This is a platform and not merely content. As such it has the potential to grow and to become ever more complex and hence interesting.
Platforms will be the future of the social web.
Well done Andy and the gang:
As the name suggests, the project is based around a basic premise: what will it take for political candidates to get my vote? Every person has their own reasons for selecting a particular candidate, their own litmus tests, and we’re asking the public to articulate this in the form of open letters to the candidates. Using Get My Vote, you can upload your own commentary – audio, video or text – and talk about what issues or concerns will drive you to the ballot box. NPR is then planning to incorporate these commentaries into our shows throughout the rest of the election cycle.
We’ve also designed the project in such a way that local stations – both NPR and PBS stations – can create their own Get My Vote initiatives on their websites by embedding Get My Vote widgets. That way, a station can localize the project. A station in Arizona, for example, might create a local version of Get My Vote focusing on immigration perspectives, while a station in Massachusetts might challenge users talk about what it would take for local mayoral candidates to get their vote. So while most users might end up talking about the presidential candidates, I’m hoping it’s used for state and local races as well.
On the Get My Vote homepage, you’ll see that we’re using a tag cloud prominently. These tags are submitted by users when they upload their commentaries. For example, a commentary from an Iraq war vet about healthcare for vets might include tags like “Iraq,” “healthcare” and “Walter Reed.” The more often a particular tag is used by commentators, the larger it appears in the tag cloud. That way, you can get a sense of what topics and ideas are being referenced most often by commentators. Clicking any tag also will show you all commentaries associated with that word or phrase.
We’ve also ensured that the commentaries are embeddable on other websites and social networks – a first for an NPR project. There’s an embed code available for commentaries that you can grab and place in your website. You can also click an option to post on another blog or network, giving you a list of more than 20 sites where you can upload your own Get My Vote commentary, or someone else’s.
The site is now in public beta. This means that anyone can now access the site, upload their own commentaries and explore the site in general, but we’re still working out a few bugs and other minor fixes. We’re hoping that if you have any problems with the site you’ll alert us through the contact form. Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to tweak the site, and soon after that, we expect some of our shows to begin using it on air.
So when you get a chance, please visit npr.org/getmyvote, upload your own commentary and please let us know what you think. Our team is really eager to hear what you have to say. -andy
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