Two Introductions: Electionland and Check

In 2012 a small team at Meedan designed and built a platform for verifying social media reports for the first post-revolution presidential election in Egypt. As a purpose-built tool for curating, annotating, and attaching a verification status to newsworthy citizen media, Checkdesk has won media innovation awards and been used to power open source investigations from Egypt to Ukraine.

Today we are very pleased to share word that our team and our software will be playing a role in ProPublica’s groundbreaking networked journalism project Electionland, which was announced earlier today.

In the spirit of dressing for the occasion, with a nod to the rise of mobile/social journalism, we have decided to bring Checkdesk out from behind the ‘desk.’ The 3.0 version of our open source software will seek to improve the quality and reliability of the social web from a new brand perch, as, simply, Check (http://twitter.com/@check). Check it out.

Check will provide the verification workbench for Electionland. Working from an election night ‘nerve center’ at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, ProPublica will work with a national set of media partners— including the First Draft Coalition, WNYC, Univision and USA Today Network properties — and journalism school students from 13 participating J-schools, to monitor, filter, and make sense of the social signals coming from polling places across the country. While every newsroom in America will be watching vote counts, Electionland’s participants will work to keep a pulse on the election process itself, using social media monitoring technologies and verification tools to make sense of tens of thousands of individual data points from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social channels, in real time. Check is serving as a backend for the effort, enabling team members to collaboratively organize, annotate and verify reports brought into the system from around the country.

Traditionally issues of voting irregularities and difficulties have surfaced in the days after the election, in a best case these might lead to recount, but often the damage is done, and our electoral process is compromised. Electionland seeks to provide vetted, real time, incident reports and distribute these to the extensive network of local partners for deeper coverage as these events are unfolding on election night. Journalism making a difference in real time.

“Most newsrooms in America are asking an important but premature question while polls are open: ‘Who’s winning?’” said Scott Klein, ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor and the project’s leader.

“Electionland is an experiment that asks whether we can help empower newsrooms to cover other vitally important questions that day: How is the election itself going? Who’s voting and who’s being turned away?”

So, does Electionland sound as good to you as it did to us, and you want to participate? Here is the good news — it is a crowdsourced journalism effort. If you are a citizen journalist and want to contribute, or if you are a member of a local news organization and want to join the near 100 local partners that have already already signed up, or if you are just a voter who wants to support the effort, please visit http://propublica.org/electionland.

Support for Electionland comes from Google News Lab and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and Craigconnects.