GlassBooth

Mark Halperin spent the morning making his epiphany public.

It is refreshing to see a man who has been reporting on elections for twenty years and held such esteemed jobs as Political Director at ABC News make such public concession - throwing much of their previous commentary into question.

“But now I think I was wrong,” he writes. But about what?

It seems that the media coverage of elections has been for years biased towards who runs the best campaign, rather than who would make the best president. From his own pen:

“Voters are bombarded with information about which contender has ‘what it takes’ to be the best candidate. Who can deliver the most stirring rhetoric? Who can build the most attractive facade? Who can mount the wiliest counterattack? Whose life makes for the neatest story? Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.”

This is bold. But of course it is unfair to outline a problem without contributing towards its solution. Mr. Halperin asks, “what do those of us who cover politics do now?”

“In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance. But what might appear simple to a voter can, I know, seem hard for a journalist.”

Halperin is calling for reason and ration in political deliberation and I think it would be wise for all of us to heed that advice.

Glassbooth is thankful for the following:

1) coffee
2) the Internet
3) all the volunteers who worked tirelessly to make this project real
4) democracy
5) our beautiful donors
and most importantly…
6) YOU for helping create a more informed and powerful citizenry

THANK YOU ALL. Have a great Thanksgiving - The Glassbooth team

We talk about having a principle of ‘insight’ at Glassbooth. What does that mean? Thanks for asking. It means that we try our best to keep our finger on the pulse of democracy and how people are using the Internet. We recognize projects that are great, and look for ways to fill voids that are not being met. While we continue to innovate and create new tools to empower people with information - I’ll take a moment to realize a trend in the way people are organizing political information online.

The following tools all in some way or another attempt to match personal opinion with opinion of presidential candidates. Some do it well, some not so well…but that isn’t important. What we recognize at Glassbooth is that folks are trying to get creative about informing voters, and we love that. Give them a try, let us know what you think, lessons learned, how sweet we are, how not sweet we are, etc.

VoteMatch
PEW: Beyond Red vs. Blue
SelectSmart
Dehp.net
Politichoice
WQAD
USA Today
Candi-date
Change.org
ABC News
My Election Choices
PigeonTech

…whatever.

So Katie Couric says the word “Glassbooth” tonight on CBS Evening News and somewhere across the country a server quivers and says “oh no.”

CRASH.

Sorry for the inconvenience, truly. The mass of traffic hitting the site simultaneously caused us to go temporarily offline. But the hack team at Glassbooth is on it, and we are back. Please enjoy the site, drop a line, leave a comment, and let us know what you think. We are adding new features in the future, so please stay in touch with the blog for more updates.

Sorry again. It was Katie’s fault, I swear.

A little recognition thank you.

About a month ago, the PEW Research Center released one of their good/bad surveys that I always find particularly insightful.

The surveys are good in the sense that they are revealing about public sentiment. The surveys are bad, because they most often reveal an underlying sense of cynicism, malign, and discontent with American politics.

Some surprises here and some interesting findings I will raise. First, a surprise: 41% of respondents could not name one single Republican presidential candidate. Not sure what to make of that one. There are some high profile people in the bunch. A 2000 presidential frontrunner, an actor on a popular television show, the mayor of New York City during 9/11. What do you think?

Moving along, the survey reveals some things I felt when first coming up with the idea for Glassbooth that now seem more real.

55% of the respondents feel the presidential campaign is “dull”
I think we made a keen insight at Glassbooth. It’s not always that people are too busy to engage in politics, it’s that politics are not compelling. Consider the competition. Entertainment is so highly sophisticated today. The dramas are complex, the content often scandalous, the editing lively, the humor sometimes actually funny. When compared with reruns like the 32nd Democratic debate - this response is not surprising.

When asked if they would like to see more or less coverage of candidates’ positions on the issues, 77% of respondents said they wanted more, the highest of all the prompts
When thinking about this, it is also worth considering that 45% of respondents (the plurality) want less coverage of who is leading in the polls. News networks would be wise to take note. What is America saying in these numbers? People are feeling uninformed about the election and when candidates aren’t speaking in their town, they must turn to the news for political information. But its not giving them what they want. Instead the news covers politics like a horse race…apparently a very “dull” one at that.

Glassbooth is about remixing and rethinking the way we interact with political information. We try and make it fun and interesting by allowing you to directly access the information you specifically want to see about the issues that are important to you with cool and innovative tools. We’ll never poll you, but let us now how we’re doing.

I do a Technorati search of Glassbooth every so often to see what the blogosphere is saying about the site. I’m stunned as I flip through the largely positive comments when I see people saying glassbooth.org is a tool for the “lazy voter.”

There are over 3,000 pieces of information about candidate stances spread across 90 questions in the Glassbooth back end. To create any one question, every single candidate needs to have made a statement or vote on it in the public record. Thus, while it might be easy to find out what Barack Obama thinks about universal health care, it is much more difficult to find what Duncan Hunter thinks about the Alternative Minimum Tax. Basically, assembling the back end was no small task.

Working with On The Issues and a research team of a dozen volunteers, I figure the breakdown is as follows:

-Each question takes about three hours to research
-90 questions multiplied by three hours is 270 hours.

So ask yourself: Do you have 270 hours to find out where every single candidate stands on today’s important issues?

To illustrate the point, consider the average American worker taking on this task.

The “average American” is based on the following:

Wake-up: 7:00 AM
Go to work: 8:00 AM
Start Work: 9:00 AM
Finish Work: 5:00 PM
Arrive Home: 6:00 PM
Eat Dinner: 7:00 PM
Sleep: 12:00 PM

Free time: 25 Hours (during week)
Free time: 26 Hours (weekend)
Total free time: 51 Hours (per week)

Thus, if the average working American attempted to do the Glassbooth research to educate him or herself on every candidate they would need to devote the following amount of time:

All free time: 5 weeks and 2 days
1/2 free time: 10 weeks and 5 days
1/4 free time: 21 weeks and 4 days
1/8 free time: 42 weeks and 1 day

A real world example of the power of Glassbooth’s work in regard to saving time came from a conversation I had this summer with a rep from the United Steel Workers Union before we had launched the site.

I explained the concept. “Where is this site? Our workers could really use this,” she told me. “Steel workers work 40 to 60 hours a week. They worry about putting food on their tables. The New York Times politics section—sadly—is not always their number one priority.”

So when someone tells you the Glassbooth User is politically lazy, it is important to remember that while Glassbooth is here to provide you with candidate information, the Glassbooth User is everywhere providing you with everything else.

A lot of people have been coming back with questions on how Glassbooth works. Why they are being paired with the candidates they are and how. Like we say…we are not Google, we want you to know exactly how you derived your results. Here is a look under the hood at the logic that drives this application and how it all works. Have a look, and feel free to go back and experiment with the points you give to each issue and see how this works for yourself.

Put simply, Glassbooth is a proximity test; we see how you feel about the issues you care about and show you which candidate is closest to your beliefs and why.

FIRST, you tell the system which issues are important to you. This informs which questions will be delivered on the second screen as well as how much they influence your total proximity to the candidates. More points to an issue = more questions on that issue and more influence for questions about that issue on your score.

SECOND you take the quiz. Each answer has a numerical value, from 1-5. 1 = strongly oppose, 5 = strongly support.

We have already scored every candidate on every question on the same 1-5 scale. All of the information we used to weigh the candidates is available on the results screen, including sources.

THIRD, your score is compared to the candidates’ scores, and we determine your proximity. Negative or positive differences are scored the same way (if you are neutral, a candidate who is strongly supports or strongly opposes is the same distance from your stance on either side). If you are completely aligned, you are 100% on the question - completely on opposite sides of the spectrum, 0%, and if you are only one space away, you are 75% on the question.

Your proximity is then run, question by question for each issue, to find your average proximity by issue. This is the percentage you will see on the results page for your proximities that are broken down by issue, not your overall score at the top or in the issue summary.

Now the weighting you did on the first screen comes back into play. However many points you allocated to the issue in question is converted to a percentage of total weight. Remember you had 20 points to allocate. 20 Points on one issue = 100% influence of your total proximity score. 10 points = 10/20 = 50% influence. We multiply this influence score by your issue proximity percentage (from the paragraph above), for each issue, and add them up for your overall candidate score.

(click the image above to see how the scoring works)

For this reason, there are certain instances where you could be “very similar” on all issues except one with Candidate A, and “very different” on all issues except one with Candidate B, and still have an overall score that is higher for Candidate B.

Give the quiz another try. Experiment. Explore. Rethink what issues really matter to you when considering your president. Let us know what you find.

I was talking with my father tonight and he told me he had checked out Glassbooth. I was curious to hear his thoughts.

He told me he liked the design, the intuitive feel, the fact that it was easy and informative.

“So who did you get?” I boldly inquired.

“I got Bill Richardson as my first,” he said.

ME: So would you consider voting for Richardson or looking into him more closely now?
HIM: No.
ME: Why?
HIM: Well, I mean he has no shot.
ME: So?
HIM: Well what about electability and character?
ME: I hear you, but you and Bill Richardson have a lot in common, and I think that you must at very least give him some further consideration.
HIM: Well Hillary was also up there pretty high and she is a frontrunner.
ME: But…I mean…I think you are missing my….whatever.

When we created Glassbooth, we created a meritocracy for political ideas. Unlike the mass media, every candidate’s platform would be able to compete with the others on a fair playing field. Users could then enter their own beliefs and desirable positions of candidates and find out who they most closely align with and why, regardless of their polling numbers.

Some people email me, telling me the website is not completely accurate because they know they want to vote for Candidate X but their Glassbooth results tell them they align with Candidate Y. And that’s part of the point. While we understand there is more to making a political decision than an issue-by-issue analysis of a platform - we believe that gaining a deep understanding of where a candidate stands is novel in today’s democracy.

All we want to do at Glassbooth is allow a window into where the candidates really stand. Only you can decide who is right for you to vote for…we just ask you be informed.