…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

There are few people better informed and spoken than Cory when it comes to the problematic intersection of copyright law and digital rights. But his weekend rant foregoes a lot of logic and seems to seethe anger, something I’m not used to seeing in his writing. He even dips into the rhetorical war paint usually worn by the likes of Sarah Palin:

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers).

Complete with folksy language, he actually asserts that not caring about deep level access to the iPad means you’re against moms. (An f-bomb frothing Jeff Jarvis also employs this slimy framing, only bringing in Grandma to be his prop). Not too classy, but we say things when we’re angry.

You know, though, I also remember the CD ROM days. Oh, how fondly I recall guessing at video settings on a Windows 3.11 machine for hours to get movies to play. The child-like wonder in my eyes as I had the joy of tinkering forced onto me by trying to make something inadequate work as advertised. The good ol’ days.

Power Struggle

There are real reasons to revolt. The iPad isn't one of them

It’s too bad the post is smothered in Doctorow’s demands that the technology world follow his ideals, because buried in there are good points about re-sale rights of content. In the end I couldn’t stomach the underlying requirement of the self-annointed right to tinker:

That the vast majority of users must tolerate and adapt to the complexities required to give as much access as possible to the extreme minority who have the knowledge and skill to handle deep level access.

The spectacle of a rant turns to sad when we see how wrong these critics are: the iPad is hackable, but the catch is that you have to pass a skill-testing question called Jailbreaking. Early adopters passed this test within 24hrs of the iPad’s release this weekend. These people are truer hackers than those that Doctorow argues for, who seem to need a red carpet and latté waiting for them when they arrive. Maybe they will want to hack it, maybe not. The important thing is that Apple and its customers shoulder the cost for their opportunity to tinker.

Fantasy and Reality

When I read these iPad oh noes! posts I feel an echo of technology in the Star Wars movies: everything is exposed and always in a state of partial disassembly; doors snap open and closed with unforgiving speed, catwalks around control panels have no safety railings, and absolutely everything is open enough for R2 to hack into. I’m not sure I’d want to live in that world, though I love watching it.

Obi-Wan installs a camera driver

A technology made by a for-profit corporation is no place to look for champions of your political rights or ideals: that’s a recipe for ongoing frustration and disappointment. If he wants to really make the course of politics and law better, he should get into politics and law, and stop using the language of political rights as a proxy to getting his way with a product.

What I really hope Cory and others realize is that completely open technologies are not a zero-sum game. Apple has not taken away any hackable netbook, has not outlawed Linux and has not prevented anyone from coming up with alternatives to their tablet, which Android is poised to do at some point. I wonder if the real anger is that people actually like Apple’s decisions in this respect, and not the philosophical ideals that Cory and others take to heart.

Meanwhile, creativity and innovation seem the order of the day in the App Store, as demonstrated in a similarly fed up post by Giles Bowkett. But what I really look forward to seeing is people who have long felt alienated by computers and the geeks they need to save them, pick up something new and use it with ease. You know, the great experience, the one we all want to deliver. That’s the standard I’m aiming for and measuring by.

At the time I thought that for certain the app would make a big deal about getting out to vote on election day. But when I fired it up to check this morning, I was let down.

What kinds of features should an election day mode take on? Time left before polling stations close, a map to your registered polling station, where to call and what to do if you’re turned away or witness irregularities, and of course, a way to document your voting experience and share it online. That’s all for version 2, I guess, but smart money is working on a white-label approach to this kind of application for the next elections, that’s for sure.

Another app that I’d been loving but didn’t come through today was the Slate poll tracker.

The Slate app is a small masterpiece in poll tracking, offering both just enough info for a quick stop, or in depth as far as you want to go within the window of recently relevant results. This app kept me entertained through more than one lunch, I’m embarrassed to say. If I could have wished for one thing it would have been results tracking mode. Again, the ball is dropped on designing for the big day.

The really big winner for today’s election in the United States? Well, that one is obvious, and it’s welcome news indeed.

When I say technology, I mean it in the sense I learned from reading essays on the subject by scientist, teacher and writer Dr. Ursula Franklin, where technology is not only the material tools that we use, but also the process by which we use them. Elections are about as close to an ultimate expression of that concept as I can imagine: democracy is realized through myriad tools and procedures, and exists only when it is practiced. The rules for handling and counting votes are as important as the ballots themselves, because neither the materials nor the process for operating them can produce the same results on their own.

Note that I’m not talking about the campaigns themselves, which are vastly more complicated than the casting and collecting of votes. While less complicated, election day is where the output of tabulated votes is transformed through observation and belief into an outcome of collective decision-making, spanning vast geography in a small timeframe, scaling up to a hundred million participants or more. And we thought web 2.0 was cool; the electoral mechanism itself is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

But there’s an ugly trend making its way into the technology of voting, one so familiar that we can feel powerless to change its course even though every early sign suggests that we should: polling stations are putting high-tech into the voting booth itself.

There’s enough suspense to go around for one day, so I’ll put my conclusion up front: the current and foreseeable generations of electronic voting machines have no place in democratic elections. None; nada; them and the horse they rode in on. For the rest of this post, I’ll explain how that conclusion came about.

What, Me Worry?

If you’re bracing for a rant on dishonest election officials and the ease of data manipulation that electronic voting can provide, I can’t deliver that. Though integrity and security in electronic voting machines is obviously very important and current, it’s a red herring that sidesteps the whole question of whether the machines should really be in use at all.

So let’s assume honesty in election officials for the sake of discussion. Take a few moments to watch this video showing the calibration process for a touch-screen voting machine that misbehaves across party lines:

Just put the key thing in and tap out a quaint sequence, and then it all works. It’s so simple, except that it’s heinously complicated. Not the actual calibration, but everything involved. The key used by the official is itself likely more complex than any voting machine preceding touch-screen technology. As such, the key, the touch-screen, the paper recording device, are all likely to be beyond the understanding and means to repair or to re-create by anyone present at the voting station. Put simply, the technology makes the material side the exclusive domain of electronics and software specialists.

Deep Disconnects

Rather than a person creating the mark on a ballot – the piece that is counted as a vote – , a voting machine sublimates the process of recording the mark on the ballot into the binary, scrambled and untouchable in the process of making the ballot. It’s like having to whisper your choice to someone else, who then goes around the corner and marks the ballot on your behalf. But that person moves very fast, and lives free of political bias, so it’s all cool?

In the video we see this machine making a printed record for visual verification at the point of voting. This feature is definitely reassuring, but initial counting still originates from a software record, making the paper trail the source of truth only when arbitrating a challenge to the results.

So there are really two serious disconnects in the overall usability of electronic voting machines: the first between non-specialist (polling volunteers and officials), and specialists (who design, assemble and service the machines), and the second between the voter and the actual recording of the vote. On the more practical side, they add expense and error-prone complexity to running elections, pushing up costs even though the trees get a break with less paper. Reliability, accountability and a good user experience are concerns closer to home.

The Long Game

I’ve recently been enjoying Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. The story features a culture of monastic academics, dedicated to preserving knowledge through millennia through traditions of thought and an ascetic lifestyle. While the world outside their walls seems contemporary and turbulent, their anachronistic lifestyle keeps them steady in their service of cultural knowledge. Good times.

Anathem, Stephenson has said, is inspired in large part by the Long Now Foundation and their signature project, the Millennium Clock. It sounds far-fetched, but the clock is built to run for 10,000 years. Given the changes in the last 200 years, we can barely speculate on the highs and lows that await humanity in the centuries to follow ours. Given this goal, the clock has one particularly eye-catching design requirement: it must be built so that it can be maintained and repaired with nothing more complicated than Bronze-Age technology. This affordance for radical, unforeseen circumstances makes the clock’s workings and the knowledge of timekeeping they embody accessible.

Back to elections. Almost. In the last few years I’ve seen the rare electronic till failure in restaurants, retail and grocery stores. Most times, there’s no manual backup in place. That is, there’s no stack of blank receipts for making transactions, no procedure to follow after turning it off and on, and then calling support. Or the manager, who will then call support after asking if they tried turning it off then back on. For a store it’s lost sales. Where electronic voting is in place, it can mean lost votes easily numbering more than would have broken ties in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. It’s worth asking if the moments of awkward register crashes at the store foreshadow a loss of knowledge about how to run an election without electronic voting, should electronic means become the norm from classroom to government for several generations.

The potential benefits of electronic voting are hard to resist: faster results would be hard to give up. I know, because I’m watching early results now and yes, fresher feels better. The prospects of securing votes from interference are fleeting when you start to consider the huge number of vulnerabilities that become possible with electronic voting machines.

The paper vote, for the things it can’t do, has benefits that I think outweigh those of speed and arguable security.

Like the clock built to be understood and maintained for 10,000 years, democracy should be practiced in a way that ensures its availability where electronic assistance isn’t possible. Future generations should be able to re-create the technology of a democratic election without more than a ballot, a way of marking it, and rules for casting and tabulating votes. By keeping the technology of voting simple, we also ensure that it remains accessible, reachable through materials on hand and without the need for specialized knowledge. Closer to home, we as voters know that people should never have to leave the poll at all uncertain that the interface recorded their intention honestly.

By doing so, we’ll be preserving one of society’s key mechanisms for consensus decision-making, and enjoying the certainly of knowing one’s vote has truly been cast.

CollegeHumor asks, what if the US election had a Facebook page? Jason Michaels offers an answer that somehow captures so very much with so little.

Yesterday saw the launch of an iPhone application for the Obama campaign. Big deal? Yes, I do think it is.

While electoral campaigns have been getting hip to mobile technology for a few years now, all that I’ve known of only treat the devices only as outbound communication targets, with the person holding the handset as the end-point in the experience. That view focussed on the output, such as a news update, as the end in itself and ignored the user’s desired outcome: becoming a more effective advocate for one’s chosen candidate. Appropriately, while listening to both the Canadian and US leadership debates last night, I spent some time with the Obama app and found the start of a whole new game for how campaigns look at smartphones, and possibly for how future elections will be fought and won.

The Obama app could have been so much less, a mere aggregator and a pretty face for a bunch of newsfeeds and media sources. Instead, the experience prefers the user’s ability to reach outward and to make action happen on the spot more than it treats them as audience.

Campaign communication traditionally rests on what I call the hopeful interruption model: the phone call as you come out of the shower, the appeal to register while you’re on your way to lunch, the leaflet that arrives with bills. They all try to make the best of an unexpected interruption, and at best it’s a hit and miss operation.

The Obama app leaves hopeful interruption behind and becomes part of a primary mobile communication, productivity and entertainment device. As the one thing someone is likely to have with them out on the street, it opens the most critical campaign channels to on-the-spot interactions. In other words, it situates a campaign’s resources comfortably in the social reality of an electoral race.

Highlight Parade

Ring-Ring, ObamaPhone

The application integrates with the phone and contact list, and offers for using the phone aspect of the application and a note on privacy. A is built in, and by state.

By tapping into the existing address book and putting its own sorting into action, the application instantly becomes a one-person call center, noting who hasn’t yet been called and letting users show off some basic stats for time and effort spent.

Newsitainment

The Obama app contains its own as well as a news aggregator, which isn’t very new in itself but within this context is a no-brainer.

Talking Points

A pocket encyclopedia of Obama’s position on various issues offers summary points for answering questions and getting talking points on the spot. The amount of information to be found in this section alone likely equals about 3 kilos of campaign literature leaflets in the pocket, all the time. It needs a search, but it’s a great start. I can see this part being used openly or quietly amid discussions over the issues.

Come Together

Two very important features for getting people involved in-person leverage location-awareness: finding local events and local offices where one can get more involved. I couldn’t get far with these features, being in Vancouver, Canada where Obama is surely not campaigning, but their utility is clear: make it easy to find and join into the real-world gatherings that truly energize voters.

Update Opt-In

Here’s the real make or break point in finding a new way of thinking about electoral communication: Receive Updates. Rather than assume that because the application has been installed, the user is now open to a firehose of updates, the Obama app asks you to . No new channel for team Obama to manage, and an extra bit of consideration for the user’s attention. That care for permission and the value of attention, though technically simple, is a moment of brilliance in campaign communication thinking.

Make a Difference Right Now

For the nuts and bolts of a campaign, there are two things that matter most: the money and the vote. The home screen brings these two together near the bottom, marked by an eye-catching green button to kick off a new donation. When a mind changes, when a sensibility is outraged and demands change, it’s a prime time for capturing a donation. Tapping the button , requiring no transaction through the iPhone itself, but instead tapping into the built, operating and proven channel for taking donations that is already there.

Also near the bottom is a countdown of days to the election, and I’ll be sure to check on the app on election day to see what it does then. The application does nothing that is particular to only the iPhone, so I think it can be ported with ease to other smartphone platforms. And to other campaigns.

What makes the Obama app a game-changer for campaigns in general is its potential to turn any interested supporter into a supported and connected campaigner in 5 minutes, and for turning interest into action at many points through the contest. Elections are probably the most complicated and drawn out conversion processes, aiming to capture the ultimate clickthrough: someone’s vote. The ingenuity and imagination of the Obama app for iPhone raises the bar to something new. Watch for it in, oh, about three and a half years.