For the first time in US history, citizens were able to use social media and mobile communication to document an election process first-hand. They did so in astonishingly high numbers.
The Twitter Vote Report project enabled citizens to report on the election using Twitter hashtags, SMS, VoIP, iPhone and Android apps. Reports were filed about wait times, weather and other conditions that might effect voters at the polls. David Troy talks about his role as CTO for the project and how the whole thing was put together in about 3 weeks using all volunteer help.
After all the data was collected, Troy also lent his CTO expertise to the Inauguration Report '09 project. The project helped create first hand documentation of people's experiences at the 2009 presidential election. The source code was made completely Open Source and archived by the Library of Congress as a primary source document. Troy talks about what it took to put this together and touches on what the future of croudsourcing and citizen journalism might look like.
David Troy is a serial technology entrepreneur. He founded a mail computer sales firm at age 14 in 1986, and transitioned into the Internet Service Provider market when he founded ToadNet, a prominent ISP in the mid-Atlantic area. He was an initial investor in Core Communications, a profitable CLEC based in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2004, he sold ToadNet to Landmark Communications (parent company of the Weather Channel, Trader Publications, and several other media properties) in an all-cash deal.
David is the founder and CEO of Popvox, LLC, an global VoIP consultancy providing design and operations support to emerging carriers in Europe, South America, Canada, and the United States. He is an active contributor to Asterisk, author of the AstManProxy manager proxy, and develops code for OpenSER. He lives in Arnold Maryland with his wife and two children, and is a certificated private pilot.
In 2006, he developed innovative distributed callcenter technology using Asterisk, OpenSER, and Ruby on Rails, which was used in the 2006 US elections.
In 2007 he developed the sites Twittervision and Flickrvision, which will be featured at the Museum of Modern art in New York in 2008. His most recent project is spinvision.tv, which allows viewers to see videos from around the world.
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