Glassbooth.org | Ian Manheimer & Robert Boyle | Talks at Google

So, yeah, I want to acknowledge Robert and Mark, who wasn't in the introduction, have both been with Glassbooth since the start and are co founders with myself. So we are excited to be here. So you just click to flip through here? Yeah. Okay. So we're excited to be here. Leslie, we live with, and she was always talking about Google, if I'm pronouncing that right, and how she'd always come here and spend so much time here. So we were very curious, and before we came, we typed it into Alta Vista, and you have a very interesting website and a very expensive stack. And we're very excited to be here. And we think, you know, there are some parallels between the work that we do and the work that you do as people who are helping people find the information that they're looking for. So we want to start off and say thank you for doing what you do, because we think in a lot of ways, Google is really laying a foundation for entrepreneurship. And we did a lot with a little to get this project off the ground. When we first started, we identified a small amount of money we might need to make this thing go, and we took a trip to New York to meet with one of our big potential donors. And I was like, mom, I need some money to make some democracy here really badly. And she wrote us a $5,000 check. Robert and I were there, and it was incredible. And with $5,000, we almost took this thing all the way. And we couldn't have done it without the free tools that Google offers. We use Gmail, we use Google Analytics, we use Grand Central, which I think Google purchased. We use calendars, we use docs, we use it all. Sorry. So we're honored to be here. And I think Robert even particularly is particularly honored. He has something of a, I'd say, schoolgirl crush on Google and the work you do, which he can get into later. So I want to start and say that I know I've watched a few of the speakers who've come here. It's a lot of authors, academics, people who are experts, you'd say. And I don't proclaim to be an expert on anything, really, except glassbooth itself. So I want to talk about first, Glass Booth, what we do, why we exist, how we made it, how we got here. I think there's some lessons in there about entrepreneurship and some principles that went into our organization that I think you'll find parallels in yours. And then I want to use Glass Booth, really, as a foundation for starting to talk about a larger More abstract discussion, hopefully, about why Glass Booth has to exist and what democracy looks like in this country right now and its relation with the media. So I'll start off, you know, recently Robert spoke on a panel at Harvard, at the Institute of Politics, and this is one of the most renowned institutes in the country. And it was to Talk about Web 2.0 and how this was being used in politics today. And really the discussion was about how we could sort of exploit these new technologies to continue on politics, how we can bring more voters to a certain candidate, how we can push a candidate's message through these new technologies. And one of the other panelists on the panel with Robert said during the. During the presentation, issues don't matter. Right. And what she meant was that issues are not an effective way to communicate to people. People don't care about issues. They care about emotion, you know, and rhetoric. And to that point, you know, we firmly had to disagree for two main reasons. First being we think issues is the way to engage, is the way to bring people into the political process. And then two. Sorry, Mark. Two, is that with all this knowledge in the room and all the brains, there was a lot of talk about how to do these things, how do we exploit these technologies to continue politics as usual, but very little talk about if we should. And that's sort of the onus that's on us and anyone else who's sort of starting to step into democracy and trying to make change. So I'll start by, you know, telling you a little bit about our story. We started this summer, this past summer, and it was sort of came out of a series of discussions that I was having with some of my friends. Robert, my friend Alex, who's in New York, and we were talking about democracy. And at the same time, we were starting to identify that we had this incredible amount of spare time, that after we checked out at work, we started playing video games. And we found that this spare time could really be something powerful, that we might have an opportunity here to put in some real work and do something. So we knew that there was going to be a lot of attention around the 08 elections and that we can in some way piggyback off of that. So we want to get involved there, but we sort of come from different political stripes, and so it wouldn't be involved with a campaign. It would be something else. So we decided that we would start by looking into the heart of democracy in America. And we spent a month just doing flat research, looking at journal articles, studies, whatever's out there. And starting to deeply understand the nuances of civic behavior in the country today. And at the time, Alex, who was one of the founders, was in Europe. And Robert and I started telling our friends about this, and people are like, I don't even know what you're talking about. What's this Internet thing? And then we're like, we just start cranking and our friends stop seeing us, and we're just working pretty much all the time. And so part of our story is that we start to identify the things became clear of what it would take for this project to go. And each one of those things was something we would be taking on for the first time, having very little experience in almost anything. So the first task was to incorporate. So what we did was. Robert got one of his lawyer friends at law school who was a professor, and she helped us incorporate. We incorporated in Massachusetts, and then we filed for a 501 tax exempt nonprofit status with the IRS. And I'll get back to that, sort of the thinking behind that, why we are a nonprofit, why we think that's important. Actually, that was a whole trip that sort of sidetracked our organization, that the IRS mismanaged our application, and it got lost. And it was sort of in a black hole and actually had to get my congressperson to come in and sort of advocate for us to pull it out. But we just recently got our 501. So we are official. There will be a collection plate going around, so feel free to put change in it.

So.

I'd say next was we had to build a website. And I think I had the most experience on the team as having used Blogger before. And that was really not any sort of technical expertise that would go to anything here. So we looked around us and did a deep search. And I got my roommate and my friend's roommate to do it. And those are the first two paid contracts and only paid contracts of Glassbooth, which is also part of our story of how we got this done. Three, we had to spread the word. We had to get this thing out there, and we had to do it in a way that reached the right people, reached the most people, because we really think it's something for everyone and something that was cheap, most importantly. And then four, we had to find money. And just coming a little bit from the nonprofit world, this is the worst part about being in the nonprofit world. If any of you have worked in the nonprofit world, nobody likes to ask for money. They feel like somebody's doing a favor for them. That's why everybody's looking for a development consultant to come in. And there's no one out there because people don't go generally into that work to ask people for money. And we also realize there's sort of a shortcoming of the whole nonprofit world. And that's it's all tied to short term grants. And if you want to do something with long term impact, when your grants expire every year, you end up devoting way too many of your resources to doing development, not enough to doing content. So our challenge was to do traditional fundraising, but also to think of creative ways to bring in interesting revenue streams. But we learned very quickly that from the start, without anything to show people, it was going to be very difficult to raise money. So we had to go just to our family and friends and start shaking down our grandparents for whatever money they could and asking everybody to chip in any way they could. And really, that is actually what it took to. To get the thing off the ground. So we sort of set out where those, pretty much that list became departments of what you would call Glass Booth. At this point, we have a handful of people working for us. And I don't think. I think something started there where we said, wouldn't it be cool if there was a website that did this, which is help people express their beliefs and then find out those of the presidential candidates. I don't think at the time that we had any idea what that meant for our lives going forward and how much work that would be. And sort of the effort, in particular the research. I'll speak real briefly about. What we had proposed to do was lay out the issues, lay out 16 candidates at the time across 90 issues. So if you do the math with several pieces of information for each candidate's position on stance, each piece of information handpicked and verified, you're talking about incredible tasks in a very short amount of time to go out there and pull together the public record of all these candidates. I don't know if this picture comes up.

No.

So three main ways that we accomplish this. One is as a nonprofit, or we had anticipated to be a nonprofit. Pro bono services, we can't afford legal, we can't afford priority, we can't afford any type of consulting. But what we can do is tell you that if we do get our 501, you can write off your services to us. So with that, we ended up pulling in one of the biggest law firms around to represent us. We ended up getting consulting help from a really elite consulting firm in New York City. And although we had no income and weren't working too hard on fundraising at the time. We were receiving tens of thousands of dollars of service for free. Another way we did it is really reaching out to our network and tapping into our friends spare time that we had now capitalized on. And what we found is people wanted to get involved if they weren't doing something with their day job that they felt was inspiring anyway. If we could tell them that this was, we could prove to them that this was something important. We found people are willing to devote their time to do something if they're inspired. So I think at different times we've had over 40 volunteers working on Glass Booth. And those are people right around our network or we get on conference calls and work with them. The third way is really. It was an extraordinary effort and I know everyone here works very hard. I was trying to think of a good anecdote to really express how hard we work. I think, I mean, Robert pulled several RNiders in a row. Drug free, which was great. And our parents start worrying about us. Our health is in decline. And I think we kept telling ourselves that this is really a public service, that this work we put in now will pay off later. Plus we do it for the public and we hope we really believe that. And that's sort of what got us through those difficult times. I would say so throughout the work, we sort of had some theories about what would make us successful. And I'll get into those. I'll sort of get into the specific findings of our research a little later. But these what I'll outline, these were sort of our principles and our strategies. And I think they sort of transcend our work in a lot of ways. But first we start with a premise. The premise is that people aren't apathetic. I think that's a general conception, is that people don't care about politics. And to that I make a point. I would ask everyone in the room to raise their hand if they just voted in this last primary and to look around and acknowledge who had voted. Now I'd like anybody to raise their hand who didn't vote in the primary. Okay, Now I'd like anybody to raise their hand if they think that the amount of people who didn't vote was actually higher than people would offer. So that works if a lot of people raise their hand. So point being is that there is still a feeling of civic responsibility. We still feel an obligation whether we do it or not. We're not proud of the fact that we don't. People don't rock, like don't vote or die shirts. You know, this is something that we feel. So we knew there was an opportunity there to tap into it. So these are sort of some of our principles. First, I don't know if there's any design people, but I'll speak a little bit about our design and sort of the task there was to take a massive set of information, just a database of all that information I detailed before, and then if we had just put it up there, it would be a great resource, but it's far too daunting. It doesn't make sense. It needs to be organized. So the task then is to take that massive set of data and marry it with an inviting and intuitive design that will allow people to access the pieces of information out of that database that are personal and meaningful to them, what they're seeking next. We had to get the word to the right people. And so we realized quickly we didn't have a budget for a direct marketing campaign, which is very expensive. We weren't going to run banner ads anywhere. But we also didn't think that was most effective for what we were trying to do. We wanted people to hear about glass booths. They want to hear from their friend or they read about in the paper. A journalist had thought it was cool and had written about it. So really we did two things. First was really a PR hustle. We had a friend who worked at a PR firm, and she let us borrow her access to her sort of. It's called Bacon. It's like a LexisNexis for journalist contact information. The catch there is that you can only. You can't use it while they're working. So generally from the hours of 12am to 4, Robert's pulling as much information out of it as possible. From the hours of four to five, we're putting together a press release and a mail merge and sending it out. And then from the hours of 9 until 12 that morning, we're calling up, following up with all the journalists we had just emailed. And this was the hustle to get out the word. And in some ways, it was successful. Really. It was a great experience to just learn what it takes and why you really do need a PR firm to take on. It's a huge amount of work. The second is we wanted you to hear about it from your friends. So we tried to, in as many ways as possible, create an environment where Glass booth would take off virally, where people would send it to people they know. So we put different tools on the site. Email To a friend. We got the Facebook groups going off and getting everybody involved there and starting to spread the word through each other. Third, I'd say build trust capital. What we were doing is really sensitive. I think today politics is very polarized. People are very sensitive that the information they're receiving has a certain slant on it or certain bias. And people are very wary of who is communicating political information to them. So for us to be effective in any way, we needed to be trusted. You needed to come in and recognize that we have no agenda, that, you know, this is what we're about. And non bias has to be a core part of what we do. So the 501, the nonprofit, that's part of that. If we are in any way biased or partisan, the IRS yanks our status. So we have the oversight from the IRS that we will build this in the public's trust. Two, just the process was built with non bias. The wording, you know, if you've done glass booth. And we'll get. And we'll get to it if you haven't every wording of a question, there's so much politically charged language. How do you. Certain language has been occupied by different, you know, political interests. And we need to make sure that's the most accurate and non biased language. So we partnered with a survey research group at Harvard and they helped us out. And then just heuristically, it had to be non biased. We can't be pointing you to different directions. And I'll say, I think this was the most successful part of our entire organization. So we were just near launch and with those principles of success, we had sort of outlined that. Sorry. That we would be successful if we could accomplish those three things and roll those strategies out. And I remember right before we launched, my roommate's girlfriend was like, she hadn't heard of Glassbooth. She says, I've spent the last few hours with my roommate looking at all the candidates positions on abortion. And it's taken five hours and I can't. I haven't come to anything, any conclusions. And this is sort of where we fit in, is that people want this and there's a void and we're stepping in. Consider there's a Pew poll that came out right around our launch that said 77% of Americans, a large majority, want more information about where the candidates stand on the issues in their news coverage. This is the vast majority of news consumers telling news organizations that they want more information that we're providing. So in that sense, we felt that if we could Be successful at those principles. We could tap that market and we could be successful and popular. So then we launched. Sorry. And this is. We gave an exclusive to this sort of email newsletter called Thrillist. It's sort of like a daily candy. And we had decided they were a person. You can't buy space in here. They're a person who's recognized as trusted. They don't run ads as you can see. And it would be, it's cool. And people would send it to each other. So then we threw a party in Boston. That's me getting loose. We had worked very hard so we were just blowing off some steam and then we were live. And I think in the first weekend we had 40,000 people come. And for us that was awesome. We were like 40,000 people had come to the site, had done glass booth and I remember Alex and Robert making predictions and Alex actually makes websites that if we could get like 25,000 people awesome by like the end of the year, this and that. So we were happy and we just continued to spread the word. Is this going to help me play videos?

I don't know if it'll help me.

Play, but it'll help you hear help here. That's good enough. Let's see if we can play this video because I want to show. If I minimize this. So basically we were just trucking along, going, going for a couple weeks, updating the data, keeping it fresh, trying to spread the word. And then we got a couple weeks later, our first big break which you will was actually on television but you'll be hearing in radio.

Right now it's seven weeks from tonight, the first vote. So the president.

That's Katie Couric on CBS Evening News.

Presidential campaign will be cast in the Iowa caucuses. And here tonight campaign await notebook. And if you're wondering which presidential candidate is most in sync with you on the issues, three 24 year old buddies have started a cut a match.com website they say can help you go to glassbooth.org, answer a few questions about your position and you're matched with a candidate. The site's been up just over two weeks and already nearly 100,000 people have tried it.

Great. So that was our big break. Let me get back to where we were. That's obnoxious. Okay, sorry. That's where we were. And when people came to the site we had captured this huge audience and it was interesting because the producer of evening news had called me up and she said we're thinking about doing a story. Asked Me a few questions. One hour later, it was on television. So that's how quickly television moves. We learned the power of television rather quickly. This is what people saw when they came to the site. After all those people on television, they crashed the site. We hadn't prepared for that type of traffic spike and people were getting a blank screen. So missed opportunity in some ways, but lesson learned. And we were going to take off from there. The word was out. So this is sort of close look in Google Analytics form of our entire traffic history. So sort of here's our launch, and as expected, we had a small spike, then it would even out very slowly. And right here is Katie Couric. And who knows how high it could have been, but I don't imagine much higher than this. We did get the servers fixed as quickly as we could. Right over here is we did a partnership, I'll talk about later, with Dish tv, to bring Glass Booth to interactive television. And they sent out a bunch of PR materials around it. Right after is a Wired article that we got that's interesting because it sort of sustained an amount of buzz at this point. A lot of people are using Glass Booth, and it's sustained because the people who read Wired are bloggers. They're people who are influential online, and they can sustain an amount of buzz. Right here, Super Tuesday, which I'll talk about. And right here is a spike that dwarfs all our other traffic. And can anyone guess what that would be? Okay, that's actually for anyone who knows Perez Hilton, that's a celebrity gossip blog that covers celebrity nipples and other who's in rehab and who's not. But a small article on there, and all of a sudden you have 100,000 people within four hours going to your website. I want to take a closer look, though, at our traffic and something using Google Analytics that we found and really we think is pretty powerful. This is, you know, the first. This represents the first three states that had primaries. Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan only had a Republican primary. And what you see is traffic, steady and low traffic. And each spike here represents the day before and the day of their primary. And what it tells us is this. It's that people were using our service. People were using Glass Booth to inform their decision at the polls. People were going to Glass Booth right before they went to the polls. And for us, we had thought that would be great if that happened. And now we can see with the thanks of Google Analytics that it did. So people start thanking us, we start getting emails. And the emails were, I think particularly that was inspiring. You get people who are like, I'm so busy. Thank you for this. You have teachers who are like, my students don't care. I'm going to bring this into the classroom and try and inspire them and see if this interests them. So for us, that was awesome. But then the phone starts ringing, and we work out of my house. There's an office there, and the phone starts ringing, and on the other end, it's IBM and it's Newsweek, and it's MySpace, and it's all these companies, these Fortune 500 companies. And they've seen what we've done, and they want to do work. And so we start engaging them in different partnerships. And this is really sort of interesting for us because we had to put on sort of a front that we were a robust organization that weren't in our pajamas downstairs making this happen while they were in the room with their lawyers and everyone negotiating these deals to draw a parody on it. Actually, I don't know if Alex has given me approval to tell the story, but Alex was handling our relationship with Dish Network. And Dish Network has a large legal team. And it was a legal nightmare, if you can remember, trying to negotiate this deal and get it through, because they put it on a very fast track because of the timeliness of the election. So he's on it. He has a day job, as we all did at the time when he has scheduled conference calls. They think we have this office, we have all this employees and all this. He goes to a coffee shop in the basement of his building. He sits in there, but it's too loud to talk, so he puts it on mute. When he can sense that he's about to say something, he goes into a bathroom stall, sits down and unmutes it, and is like, okay, yeah, yeah, let's do that deal. And then mutes it back on, sits in the coffee shop. This is sort of just to draw parody of what it was like for us, a very strapped, small organization, to be negotiating with these larger Fortune 500 companies. So part of the lesson there is really, if you are a small company, you can do great things with no resources through these type of partnerships. And that's been sort of our model. This is a picture of what ended up going to. That's funny. Dish Network. If you have Dish Network, I think there's like 15 million subscribers. You can use your remote control to do glass booth. Cool. And I think about 100,000 people a week do it on their television, which was very successful. So that's us. I Don't know if there's any questions, but pretty much I think that's our story. Part of my impetus and ours for coming here was sort of to engage some really smart and creative people and get them concerned about what we're concerned about. And then, you know, if anything ever came of that, we would be thrilled. And so part of that, just to get on the same page, everyone needs to see the same problem that we saw. The reason why we started Glass Booth, the results of our research. What happens when you dive into democracy in America and you look around and I think, as you can imagine, some of the findings were pretty troubling. But we think each one of the findings was very actionable. So. And we do it one way. You know, we encourage everyone to do it any way they can. So just to dive into some of our findings. And this will be sort of the second part of our discussion where we really talk about the larger picture of what's going on here. Why does Glass Booth have to exist? We find in America there's a lot of identity politics. Stanley Fish wrote a good article in the New York Times actually yesterday. He defined identity politics as, in essence, identity politics is an affirmation of the tribe against the claims of ideology. And by ideology, I don't mean something bad, but any agenda informed by a vision of what the world should be like. So what he means is, and we do a lot of this in the us. We belong to different groups, different genders, different ethnicities, different religions, different political parties, ideologies. And then we go out and we root for our team, no matter if we agree with them or not. And what happens is people actually end up contradicting sort of what they actually, in their core believe because of who they are and who they see up there as the candidates. The problem is that it doesn't reflect what people are trying to express. And democracy relies on this. There was an interesting research that we talk about done at UNC by someone named James Stinson. And he found that conservatives, Americans self identify as conservative almost 2 to 1 over liberal now. And this is in 1972, that number was about even. And since it's doubled. But at the same time, when asking people how they feel about the issues, there's actually no reason to think that people have become any more conservative anyway. What's actually happened is that being liberal has been less appealing, I guess, to self identify. So that's we sort of step in there by removing identity from the entire process and connecting you with what you care about in Your core. Second, we find that information is empowering. This is sort of our thesis. We think that education is the foundation of any civic action. If you can educate someone on an issue and then highlight an opportunity for them to get involved, this is powerful. This is sort of our new thesis as we roll out. So when you start to talk to people who don't vote, and there was a League of Women's Voter study that and also a study by the Carnegie Corporation of Young People, and they asked non voters, why aren't you voting? And non voters are saying, we don't know enough about the candidates. We don't know enough about where they stand on issues. That's why we don't go and vote. So in Glass Booth, what we do is we educate you about the presidential election in this version, and then we lead you to register to vote, which is a small action. But the point is that education is what gets people up and gets them out to do different things civically. Third, the issues. We really think by asking you about the issues on the first page, we're bringing you in, I think, to highlight that is something we like to talk about, that young people, young people don't vote as much as other generations, older generations. They hardly vote, but they volunteer more than any other generation by far. And the generation now, the young generation now volunteers more than any, almost any generation in history. So what it tells us is that we care. Young people and young people care. It's just that they care about the issues and they don't identify through the political process. They don't see the candidates, they don't identify with the candidates. They don't see those people making the change they want to see. So they're drawn to it through what they care about. And we think that's powerful. Fourth, and for me, I think this is the most troubling are voter misconceptions. These are people who go to vote. They go, I'm voting for candidate X because, you know, X, Y, and Z. In reality, that candidate believes the exact opposite. How widespread is this? A study, National Annenberg Election Survey, found that in 2004, just in the presidential election, there are two candidates. When asked to identify where either candidate stood on eight of the biggest issues in that election, a little over half could typically identify where a candidate stood on an issue. Mind you, there's two candidates, so you have a 50% chance from the start. And I think that's troubling because what does it feel like to have a misconception? A lot of people think they know where the candidates stand. We sort of have a rational ignorance theory. It's that you sort of think about a candidate, what they connote, and then you apply it across their agenda. And I can say during the research, there are candidates who think things, who stand a certain way on issues that you wouldn't have expected. There are surprises in there. So what we do at Glass Booth is we surface those surprises. When you do it, you get a surprising result. You have an expectation of who you might get, and you get someone else, and then we show you why. And I think that's the most interesting part of what we do, because I get tons of emails from people who are like, I did your site. I really love Barack Obama. You gave me John McCain. So your site's wrong. Thanks. And I'm like, you know, maybe not. Maybe you are misinformed about where your candidate stands. Maybe you're not in touch with their most recent agenda. So it's really a juncture of cognitive dissonance where people can go either way. They can sort of accept the shock or reject the process entirely. So that's sort of our case for democracy in America. And that's really where we stepped in. That's sort of what drives us. We think it's troubling, but we think Glass Booth has something to offer. We think there's tons of creative ways to get involved outside of our process. Now we'll sort of talk about how this came to be. Why are we in this situation? Why is civic education so low? And it's easy to point fingers, and I think we will, and we'll point it at the media. And we need to establish a few things here. One is, where do we receive information about our candidates? If you're lucky, you'll get to go hear them speak, and most likely you'll read about them in a newspaper and really you'll see them on television. So I want to establish first. One misconception I think I want to clear up first is that candidates don't talk about the issues. Candidates do. If you go to hear them talk, they'll outline very briefly an agenda. What happens is that the media will cover it and package it into little pieces of sound bites. Barack Obama talking about change this or that, and cut out sort of the meat of the discussion. So there's a misconception that they're not talking. It's actually it's not being covered. I think Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone recently in Rolling Stone recently put it best when he says about the election and coverage of it. He says, while it is tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black journalist's heart, I know it's not all their fault. We did this. The press, America tried to give us a real race and we turned it into a bag of shit just in the nick of time. So what he's saying is that pretty much what I just said, that the candidates are talking. It's just that the media is not listening. So here's a slide. Sorry. That sort of establishes another misconception, that the Internet is where people are going for information about the candidates. So don't worry if television doesn't cover it properly. We can see that's not true. This is a graph of primary sources of information, of where people go when they're looking for political information. So we see Internet's king. We see, I mean, television's king. We see Internet with a small increase, but among young people, a huge increase. But still Internet television rather has been steady for the last 10 years and is the king. I wanted to play a clip and maybe the audio. Do you think it'll be worthwhile? Probably not. Awesome. All right, let's just carry on then. I was going to play a hilarious clip of the Daily show, which you would have loved, I can promise. This is tracking, we put together of the length of sound bites the media has covered since 1968. This is mostly a Harvard study that was done a few years ago. There's little information here, but here we can see it sort of flattened out at a little under 10 seconds. Most recently, it's at 7.8 seconds per sound bite. That's enough to get maybe one sentence out. In 1968, the average sound bite was 43 seconds. So we can see how substance has sort of been replaced. Next. This is sort of how the media really shakes out in their coverage of elections. The red line indicates horse race. This is who's winning, who's losing, why the tactics being used. This is policy and issues. And we see, you know, a trend towards much more about the horse race and much less about the actual issues, with this year, I guess, reaching an all time high. This is convention coverage. Most recently, ABC and other networks have decided to commit to broadcasting around three hours of the Democratic and Republican conventions. We can see over time, this is a great decrease in the amount typically covered. And I'll add that those election times, that's when people are making most of their decisions, political decisions, about who they're going to vote for. And then, of course, there's political spending on Ads. So we're set to spend $3 billion in 2008 on election ads and political ads. This is by far the most in history. But actually in ads, let's draw some parity from what you'll see in the news, they'll actually talk about issues. The accuracy of that is undetermined. But Kathleen Hall Jamison, who runs the Annenberg center, who is that's like the top studying political communication, says that if you have a choice of what to watch to get informed, either the news coverage of campaigns or the ads, the ads are better. And that's where we are. You know, that is the state of political discourse right now in the United States. You're better off watching an ad from a candidate who's trying to persuade you in a certain way than looking at the actual news. I was going to play another clip, which was Ed Murrow, the famous journalist, and it was the recreation of the movie Goodnight, Good Luck of a speech he had given in which he talks about television. And this is 50 years ago. He's talking about the opportunity of television and also the problem of television. And two points that he makes and that he's always been about his whole career. One is that television is an amazing medium and you know, he's talking about television and I'm sure he would have been talking about the Internet if it had existed. And it can inspire and it can educate if used properly. Two is that this belief that we have to air less substance to get higher ratings is a misconception that there's a huge market for substance and that his shows, which were documentary focused, issue focused, got just as high ratings as the Westerns of the time and everything like that. So you know, we share that belief. So lastly, I'll just end by saying what we did was we sort of identified all that and it became really apparent in many different ways. And there was something missing out of political discourse. There was no education about the issues, there was no delivery of that. And so where the media failed, we stepped in as information providers and sort of, this is maybe a small prescription. Our only prescription of the entire presentation is that when you step into this space in today's media environment as an information provider, people today are very wary and they've sort of developed an immune system and a self defense. We get marketed to in a million different ways all the time and we're defensive about who's trying to persuade us. Where is this message coming from? I get emails all the time of who funds you, what's your agenda? There's a lot of sensitivity here about bringing people to information. So we think the only way to address it really is to be as transparent as you possibly can as an organization. We take it seriously enough to. It's part of our name, Glass Booth. The glass represents transparency. It's very clever. Thank you, Robert. And we publish our scoring algorithm. You can see how we score the candidates. You can see all the information. It's verifiable. We cite it, we link to the original source, we list all our donors. We're completely transparent. And so all we can say is just stepping into today's information environment. We think transparency is incredibly important, that only through an open society can we start to tackle the problems that we face as a globe going forward. And this spirit of openness is really what we try to extol to anybody, you know, we can talk to. So that's us. Thank you. Thanks for coming. And if anybody has questions, I'd love to talk or if anybody, you know, anything to discuss, we'd be happy to talk or want to talk about the elections or how they're feeling today. Yes.

I just have a brief question. I was playing around for just a little bit over the weekend with your site and I noticed that one of the candidates that was recommended for me isn't in the race.

Yeah.

Is there like an effort to weed those out or is there a filter you put in? How do you approach them?

Yeah, we have something now. I'm not sure when you were checking it off. It was the other day. Any candidates in the site now currently that aren't running? We still have in there, but they're indicated in red and it's very explicitly indicated that they're no longer running. We think it's important to keep them up there because some of them are potential vice presidential candidates. So the information's in there. It should serve you, though, if the site's working properly, it should serve you only candidates who are running currently. And then when you can go to the drop down menu to see more candidates, they should be in red to indicate that. Yeah, yeah. Yes. What is your plan for the future after the election? Yes, thank you. Best question. It's a great question. Because we don't want to end after November and we're designed to not end after November. Three main things. The first is glassbooth is really.org is really a model. In this model, we applied it to the presidential election, but you can imagine it being applied to elections at all different levels. And we're actually working on a pilot program with this Wisconsin La Crosse Tribune to do the county board elections that we Wisconsin as sort of a test of what Glass Booth looks like at the local level in 2010, we launch into a few pilot states and start to roll it out, partner with organizations on the ground there and start to roll this process out into state, local, congressional, senatorial elections going forward. That's one thing. Two, there's a project we call Glass Booth 2.0, which we're doing with one of our large partners to help develop it, which is basically on that first screen where we ask you what you care about. That's a real opportunity because you're telling us, I care about these set of issues. And so our job then is to keep you connected to those issues outside the context of elections and permanently. So we'll deliver you information, education about those issues, as well as help you identify opportunities to get involved with those issues. And we think that's a really powerful tool. Third, and the sexiest thing I'd say by far is a potential television show, which we're working on right now with a production company to take our mission, which is, you know, our belief that there's not enough coverage of substance. This media doesn't support democracy in the way it should. Take that, package it nicely and bring it to television. So we're shopping it right now and let's get a television show and then we'll be Hollywood. But those are the three main directions of the organization. Yep.

What's your response to the physical fact? Hand taking steps, Whether or not your sort of goal say that you are, but it's hard to say that, you know, given the hand taking nature of some of the experience, It's hard to say that. You can back that up.

Yeah, no, understood. Yeah, understood. That was a great question. Two points. The first, also Robert and Mark, feel free to chime in. The first is that as far as what we cover, the scope of what we cover that was limited. At the time that we made the website, there were 16 candidates. And so for us, and we asked nine, we touched on 90 issues. So we asked 90 questions. To ask one question, every single candidate has to have some sort of public response or we have to exclude the question because everybody needs to be in the system. It makes it fair to the smaller candidates, to the candidates with less access to the media. So in that sense, we're limited in some ways to what we can cover. Second is the piece of work you identified, which is pairing their histories and their positions to a score. You know, oppose, support this is the one subjective piece of work that we do. So our job is to make it as accurate as possible. One thing that helps is they're scored relative to each other, which is a note. You know, it's hard to say I oppose or support an issue, but relative to the other candidates, it's pretty easy to see where they stack up. Two is, you know, we cite all the information and we made it really important to drive people to the rationale is what we call it, which is the presentation of the facts that inform their score. I'll say that's been really successful in our metrics. We can see that the average time spent on site per user is around eight minutes, which is a really large amount of time for anybody to be spending on a site with a really low bounce rate. So people are digging in and engaging. I think all that stuff, the scores, the pairing to positions and I poser support, it's important and we try to be as accurate as possible. It's never going to be perfect. But all that is really a mechanism to drive people to look for more and to dive into the information in a really deep way to click if you read a quote from Arco, click on the article, read the whole thing. And so that after you leave Glass Booth, you're just more informed about where all the candidates stand. So it's our process. Yeah, I would say also we have.

Different mechanisms on the site by which users can contact us and indicate if they do the score quality, like I think the basic one. We want you to see information. We want you to see why we scored it that way. We've had people begin to launch people contacting me and get involved in emails and all contact saying, you know, I.

Think score is on.

See, these schools are incorrect. And every email everything gets. At least in that regard, we look into and we made adjustments on the floor for the people are saying, not necessarily bringing the information, but saying it seems that maybe database entry arrow and things like that. But we made a point to our blog and on our website that we want users to use the data.

Agreed. Yes.

What percentage.

Comes from other media outlets and what is more quantifiable, it's hard to shake out, like what percentage of what I think. Yeah, well, I'd say, you know, what's been really a great tool in this election, which is newer, is YouTube. And what better to make a point of someone than have them see exactly what the candidate has said? So we try as much to bring visual into this. And so we have a lot of YouTube clips in there to add to that, I think, for example, we cover medical marijuana in here. And when I looked out there, there's really no information public. Candidates don't like to talk about marijuana, but we think it's an important issue. So there's actually an advocacy group, and what they do is they bring a camera phone or something to the different places where candidates have town hall meetings, and they ask them questions about medical marijuana, and they get responses. This is my position. You wouldn't have heard it otherwise. Now it's on YouTube. Now we put it in glass booth and it's up. So we try and bring their voting record in because it's a nice parity to their rhetoric versus their action. You know, law is very complicated, and there's a lot of different attachments to laws, which is why a person might vote it down. So it's hard to judge in isolation, but we try and bring a healthy mix of all the different sources, you know, directly from the candidate, mixed with articles and all that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.