Carolyn Pierce
11.06.2010
Billed as the “most wired election event of the night,” the WEP2010 Party did not disappoint.
Pundits, political junkies and the DC business community came out to Gloria Story Dittus’ house to celebrate the hard work on both sides of the aisle this year at the 2010 Wired Election Party, hosted by NJI Media and Story Partners.
On monitors, laptops, Blackberrys, iPhones and iPads throughout the house, the Wired Election Party Dashboard gave partygoers firsthand looks into the election results as they unfolded. Built from the ground up by NJI Media’s innovative team of designers and developers, the WEP Dashboard was a crucial feature of the party, where it was showcased throughout the house for Republicans and Democrats alike to track their party’s successes as the night wore on.
The Dashboard tracked predictions, conversation, and — most importantly — realtime results of the 2010 midterm elections. Tweets with the #WEP2010 hashtag were also highlighted on the WEP Dashboard, pulling in tweets from across the country as users provided their own commentary on elections. The WEP dashboard, which had over 10,000 page-views in a span of four hours, had political junkies across the country glued to their computers for the latest election results. The #WEP2010 hashtag was a top-ten trending topic in the regional Washington, DC area throughout election day and was used more 500 times.
The state-of-the-art dashboard was used by the likes of ABC News, National Journal, Roll Call, The Atlantic, POLITICO and a host of other pundits and political operatives. It was even featured throughout the night on the cable networks.
How we built it
NJI’s team of developers built the WEP Dashboard in stages, focusing first on the three Twitter columns; next, on the legislative race results graphs. To create the three Tweet columns, NJI Media’s development team utilized Twitter lists and xml feeds and constantly updated the feeds with a jquery carousel effect. The Campaign column was specially weighted to reflect results by influence. We designed the House, Senate and gubernatorial graphs with Google’s Graph API in mind. Our developers created a custom database to reflect the most up-to-date results and data as polls closed throughout the county. We used Foursquare’s API to continually reflect the most recent check-in at the party. The header and footer quotes were chosen and/or written by the NJI team and were uploaded to a self-updating queue. Overall, we adjusted the timing of all updates to be in “constant refresh” mode: the Dashboard maintained a constant stream of the most up-to-date data and results as the night wore on.
The final treats for partygoers — custom stainless steel NJI water bottles — were distributed at the evening’s end.
Media love:
Featured on Politico’s Election Night blog: “If you have a second between breaking news alerts, check out Story Partners & NJI Media’s election party. It’s a virtual dashboard that lets you follow relevant Twitter hash tags, and Foursquare check-ins. Nice work, guys!”
Read more:
Andrew Sullivan – The Atlantic
Media Bistro – FishbowlDC
Politico – Midterm Party Madness
Potomac Flacks
Famous DC
MIX 107.3 – Tommy Show
Twitter love:
Rick Klein (ABC News)
track votes & conversation in one place. among the good election night bookmarks: http://bit.ly/a3bbQ5 #WEP2010
IIario Pantano (Pantano for Congress)
The place to be Election Night: http://www.wiredelection.com/wep2010/ #wep2010 #nc7 #nc07 #election
Emerging Media Research Council
track the conversation and races at www.wiredelection.com. Fantastic site that I’ll be glued to all day. #WEP2010
Caroline Williams (Three Ships Media)
very cool site for tracking election chatter and returns from @StoryPartners http://ow.ly/32KCu #WEP2010 #elections
Kramer Phillips (The State Column)
For political junkies: a great DC election party #WEP2010 http://www.wiredelection.com/wep2010/
Obie Fernandez (founder of Hashrocket)
Interesting way to keep up with election results. Beats CNN anyway. #blah http://vurl.me/WOB
