Team Lead:

Contents

• Definition of Hashtags
• Basic Hashtags
• Advanced Hashtags

Definition

A hashtag is any word in twitter which is immediately preceded by the '#' symbol (a.k.a the hash).  By using a hashtag, you're signalling that you want people to be able to find your tweet and associate it with other tweets that contain the same hashtag.

In the case of votereport - we should use the hashtag for votereport (#votereport) and then the name/value pairing for infromation gathering.  Similar to what you see on URLs, name/value pairs are used to set conditions on where you are and what is happening.

Questions

• How do we determine that a report is not fraudulent?  Twitter ensures that tweets are accepted by you because of an explicit choice you make
  • (e.g. I accept that you are following me if I am open, but I can block you from recieving my tweets or
  • I can make you explicitly request to follow me via protected tweets
• My suggestions was a process that requires the person to "sign on" initially - where they do a sequence like
  • They send -> f votereport
  • We then send -> "Thanks for joining votereport.  Please respond with where youre voting (zip:XXXXX or PL:FL-19)
  • They send -> @votereport zip:10023
  • We send -> Thanks - youre polling location is: BLAH BLAH, Florida

Basic Hashtags

#votereport

You must at least include this tag in your tweet for us to be able to use your information.  There are a number of additional pieces of information you can add from there

#EP{two-letter state code} - e.g. EPNY for New York, EPOH for Ohio

This is for individuals with serious legal issues only.  Are you or someone you know being prevented from voting?  Tweet the appropriate code and a brief message about your problem, and we'll tweet back with next steps.  We have a whole coalition of voting experts supporting us.

Tags for additional issues

We're trying to keep things simple, so we've created 3 basic tags to alert us to issues that might occur.

• #machine - use this tag to signal a problem with a voting machine
• #registration - use this tag to signal problems with the registration process, people being turned away for paperwok reasons
• #wait:time - use this tag to signal a long wait.  Add a colon and the wait time in minutes - e.g. #wait:30 for half an hour, #wait:120 for two hours.

Advanced Hashtags

We're trying to keep the hashtags simple for our tweeters, but here are some more advanced hashtags that have been suggested.

#challenges -- there are widespread challenges occurring at the location.

#hava -- accessibility issues (vision, etc.).  [HAVA is the acronym is for Help Americans Vote Act]

#ballots -- out (or running out) of paper ballots

#good/#bad -- the overall experience

Our hope is that our more committed and engaged volunteers will be able to use these to provide richer and more specific data.