The Voting Information Project is cool

Yeah this is old hat to election-insiders (I am not yet one, so I can still have that sense of wonder 🙂 but I just took a drive through the “Voting Information Project” web site. I think it’s a cool idea that could be a template to catalyze very useful election related information resources in a totally decentralized manner, where each state or locality can elect when and how to join in.

In case you haven’t heard about it, this is from their site:

“…As a fundamental step in this initiative, the Voting Information Project is partnering with a group of state election officials to develop and implement a technical standard, known as an “open format,” by which state and local election officials can more efficiently disseminate voting information. ” (from Voting Information Project)

If a state chooses to provide election related information in this format, at a known URL, this information will be pulled into the VIP system and in turn be deliverable to web sites, cell phones, twitter, facebook, yadi yada.

In other words, the one fairly simple piece of work is leveraged multiple times and brought to where it can be used by voters. Pretty cool, and maybe a template for decentralized adoption and deployment of election info services of other kinds in the future.

Here’s the FAQ of the Voter Information Project.