Paul
Agreed it’s not or decision. All I am suggesting is if it is
not safe would we be better to distance ourselves from it rather than trying to
advise how best to use it. The fact that we attempt to show how to use it could
be taken by some election officials as an endorsement by us. I know MoJ are
considering putting out advice to election officials following the Newcastle case.
John
From: Paul Spencer
[mailto:]
Sent: 27 April 2009 14:03
To: John Borras; 'Sven Rubben'
Cc: 'eml'
Subject: RE: [election-services] Twitter
Hi John,
I don’t think that is our decision. It is up to the election
officials. We just go as far as the XML, then allow people to do what they like
with it. We may not agree with the use of Twitter, but we can show the
flexibility of EML by demonstrating the ability to do so. Where I am working at
the moment, they have an SMS gateway accessible to government organisations
through a web service. They could easily develop something that allowed people
to register a mobile phone number, then provided election results as SMS
messages to them. At least, they could if this were a democracy J.
Newcastle published its local election results on Twitter, so I
looked at how easy it would be to automate this from an EML510. The answer is
“it depends on the 510”. If you were publishing on web site, you could provide
a general purpose stylesheet that would cover many 510 message types. For
Twitter, the limitation of 140 characters means that you need to tweak the
application to the actual fields being used. Finding that (something that is
perhaps obvious, but it becomes more obvious when you try it) is valuable in
itself. Someone, and my guess is David, tried to post a 510 that did not have
the candidate names, so it didn’t work. I am not sure why it didn’t appear at
all, but even if it had, the text would have been meaningless.
Regards
Paul
From: John Borras [mailto:]
Sent: 27 April 2009 16:17
To: Sven Rubben
Cc: eml
Subject: RE: [election-services] Twitter
Thanks Sven. That goes along with my fears. Unless
we could guarantee somehow that using EML would protect against fake results
being shown on Twitter, and I don’t see how we could do that, I would suggest
we should distance ourselves from using that channel.
John
From: Sven Rubben [mailto:]
Sent: 27 April 2009 12:55
To: John Borras
Cc: eml; Paul Spencer
Subject: RE: [election-services] Twitter
Hi,
I saw this post
a couple of days ago about fake facts on Twitter: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/fake_facts_on_t.html
This is of
course not completely relevant because election results are quite visible, at
least in Belgium. But I know for a fact that certain results are copied, some
even manually and with errors (these errors were visible for a few hours :-) ).
So someone could, theoretically, inject false results. However, there are lots
of sites that follow the official results (again in Belgium), so I'm not sure
what someone would gain from this, or how successful they would be.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Sven Rubben
IBM GBS
Tel BLS: +32 2 225 27 47
GSM: +32 495 26 13 10
Notes: Sven Rubben/Belgium/IBM@IBMBE
Internet:
Private:
From:
"John
Borras" <>
To:
"Paul
Spencer" <>, "eml"
<>
Date:
04/27/2009
11:42
Subject:
RE:
[election-services] Twitter
I’d
be interested to hear of views on this as at least one local election official
here in UK has used Twitter to publish results which I thought was very risky.
John
From: Paul Spencer [mailto:]
Sent: 24 April 2009 13:24
To: eml
Subject: [election-services] Twitter
OK guys, I have
done a very basic posting of an EML 510 to Twitter. See http://boynings.co.uk/emltwitter/. Once you have
uploaded a results file (note the documentation of fields that are used – you
can’t just upload any old 510), you can see the result on Twitter. The user is
emlelections. You can also search by the ContestId attribute in your file
preceded by the “#” character.
Have a go, and
let me know how you get on.
Paul
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