Jacob Soboroff

Jacob

I'm the AMC News correspondent, host of KCET's SoCal Wanderer, and executive director of Why Tuesday? I co-hosted NBC's School Pride and have contributed reporting to CNN, NPR's Weekend Edition and the PBS series WIRED Science. I'm a member of the City Year Los Angeles associates board. I got my BA in politics and MA in political theory and philosophy from New York University. During college, I was an advance man to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and presidential candidate Howard Dean. Watch my reel at jacobsoboroff.com/reel.







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There’s a write-up by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries of my 140 Character Conference panel “Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time” on the Wall Street Journal’s website. She focuses on the theme of our panel, that there are ways social media can be used to increase and protect voter participation. The use of Twitter as a vote-monitoring tool might have gained the most attention during the dramatic protests in Iran last year, but election experts in the U.S. say there are plenty of ways to use the service to improve voting in this country as well. A fast-moving service such as Twitter can be the best way to get information about what is going on during elections, because it’s easier to access and doesn’t get tied up the way phone lines can, said California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. She said she has used the service to monitor what is happening in her state during elections, whether it’s a potential election-law problem or something less dire, such as the status of lines. “With 24,000 polling places, somebody is going to oversleep and forget the key” — and Twitter can help get out the message that these inevitable problems shouldn’t discourage people from voting, Ms. Bowen said at a Twitter confab called the 140 Character Conference, which gets its name from the number of characters allowed in tweets. “This is something we can do without running to the lawyers on election day,” said Nancy Scola, an associate editor at techPresident, a blog that focuses on how campaigns are using the Web. “A lot of problems can be solved by people making noise” and can be resolved by open communication rather than election lawsuits, she said. For the complete article, click here. For the video of our panel, click here. Photo of WSJ via CAIVP on Flickr.

There’s a write-up by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries of my 140 Character Conference panel “Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time” on the Wall Street Journal’s website. She focuses on the theme of our panel, that there are ways social media can be used to increase and protect voter participation.

The use of Twitter as a vote-monitoring tool might have gained the most attention during the dramatic protests in Iran last year, but election experts in the U.S. say there are plenty of ways to use the service to improve voting in this country as well.

A fast-moving service such as Twitter can be the best way to get information about what is going on during elections, because it’s easier to access and doesn’t get tied up the way phone lines can, said California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. She said she has used the service to monitor what is happening in her state during elections, whether it’s a potential election-law problem or something less dire, such as the status of lines. “With 24,000 polling places, somebody is going to oversleep and forget the key” — and Twitter can help get out the message that these inevitable problems shouldn’t discourage people from voting, Ms. Bowen said at a Twitter confab called the 140 Character Conference, which gets its name from the number of characters allowed in tweets.

“This is something we can do without running to the lawyers on election day,” said Nancy Scola, an associate editor at techPresident, a blog that focuses on how campaigns are using the Web. “A lot of problems can be solved by people making noise” and can be resolved by open communication rather than election lawsuits, she said.

For the complete article, click here.

For the video of our panel, click here.

Photo of WSJ via CAIVP on Flickr.

Notes  22/04/10  #140conf  #Why Tuesday