punditry.ca — uncovering DSU elections

Oops, I wrote this, saved it, then went to bed… apparently forgetting to publish it.  My bad.  Here you go, apologies for the delay.

After 5 days on the campaign trail, here’s what’s happening.

• It’s a slow day, so to fill up some space I’ll share with you Mike Smit Elections Central.  From left to right: 1. new-ish IBM thinkpad nicely outfitted.  The built-in screen is used primarily for windows that monitor & configure the punditry.ca server.  This laptop is hooked up to the 22″ widescreen Dell monitor to the right.  You can see it’s a lot brighter than the other three screens, it is my primary workspace.  Right now I have 37 browser tabs open, 101 scratch text files (also tabbed), 6 excel spreadsheets, Photoshop, email, irc, and 2 alternate browsers used for testing.  The next screen is a 19″ Dell monitor showing a browser window with tabs to all candidate homepages & facebooks, set to refresh once every 4 hours.   The page displayed is the blog aggregation page, refreshing every 30 minutes.  It is powered by the laptop on the right, my old IBM thinkpad.  Its screen is used only for twitter aggregation, 30 minute refresh.  These latter two screens are also used for research, or as window space: when I write about candidate platforms, for example, I put the platforms up on a screen so I can read as I work.  I use two logitech wireless keyboard & mouse combos as input devices.  Obviously when I’m away from my desk at my REAL job the first laptop goes with me.  This picture is the perfect blend of tech geekiness and elections geekiness.

Mike's election headquarters

If you are not familiar with word clouds, here is a pretty cool example.  They are obviously not an infallible type of analysis, but they are interesting because you sometimes see patterns not apparent from the text, free of spin.

The text for Zimmerman and Snow is right from their websites, platform descriptions only.  Snow is just over 1,000 and Zimmerman is at about 1,800.  Debogorski doesn’t have a fully articulated platform, so I grabbed the text from his poster and the text of every one of his comments from punditry.ca, 3,000 words.  The word clouds are relative word frequency, and some word stemming was done for the most-frequent words (e.g., “students” and “student” both became “students”). The word clouds were generated using TAPoR, a humanities computing project now at the University of Alberta.

The word clouds for our fearless wannabe leaders are as follows:

Shannon Zimmerman

Eric Snow

Gregory Debogorski

A few observations:

• Obviously “students” is the most common word for all three, I probably should have omitted it.  ”DSU” & “Union” are also common.  The next top word for Zimmerman is “Shannon”, for Snow is “Sustainability” and “Societies”, and for Debo is “Democracy”.

• The first thing I noticed was the internal/external split.  The DSU President ideally has a very strong internal role and a very strong external role.   If you look at Zimmerman’s words, they are almost all internal: administration, body, campus, carleton, community, dalhousie, deans, events, members, resources, school, senate, sexton, societies.  ”anssa” and “lobby” are the external words.  It’s the mix you’d expect from the VP Internal, essentially.  Snow gets a nice mix of external (advocacy, alliance, anssa, casa, external, hsa, lobbying, organizations) and internal (academic, administration, carleton, internal, campuses, committe, council, dalhousie).

• You’ll notice Snow and Zimmerman are both improving the current state (continue, improve, keeping, promoting, better), whereas Debo is out with the old, in with the new (status, quo, proposal, create).

• Debogorski appears to identify with time (year, time) and with his education (finance, management), and because these are conversational comments you see signs of contemplation (Hhmmm, think, oh) and debate (actually, fact, really, point, right).

• Zimmerman’s THREE WORDS are “Connected, Sustainable, Community”.  ”Connected” doesn’t show up there at all; the closest is “website”, or perhaps “campus”.  Sustainability shows up, but not nearly as often as it does for Snow.  ”Community” is there but is not in the top 50%, and I don’t see any words unambiguously associated with “community”.  Conclusion?  The three words are a catch-phrase, and have limited correlation to the actual platform.

• Snow’s platform has 5 central tenets.  Building the Grassroots: nothing shows up.  Stronger Societies: “societies” is one of his top words. Internal Advocacy: both words show up, as do internal words like “academic”, “administration”, “advocacy”.  External Leadership: nothing about “leadership”, but “external” is there, as is CASA, ANSSA, HSA, lobbying. Sustainability is his most common word after “students” and “DSU”.  Conclusion: platform mostly maintains internal consistency.

• Do your own analysis – leave a comment.

• Today the excitement of the election took a back seat to the DSU Annual General Meeting. It was covered in depth here, before and during. Jen promoted it, then live-blogged it, Lisa twittered it, readers commented on it, and punditry.ca broke.  I won’t do a recap, but I highly recommend Jen’s liveblogging and the ensuing 97 comments.

• Kudos to Mat Brechtel, chair of Council and therefore chair of the AGM.  Managing debate and trying to maintain some amount of decorum in a highly-charged atmosphere is no small task.  Maybe for April 1 they can get you one of those classroom performance systems for vote recording.  I read on Lisa’s twitter that the “chair enters Council Chambers to thunderous applause from Council”, and that applause was well deserved.

• Apparently there was vandalism in the SUB during/after the AGM, along the lines of the DSU being fascist (unconfirmed reports).  The expectation of an organization that it take instruction from people who hate it and everything about it is something I suspect is unique to student associations.  Most people who hate a given organization just want said organization to leave them alone.  (e.g., people who hate the federal government want to be left alone to collect guns and hate black people).

• William Horne made an interesting point on his blog, saying “could be just the particular turnout last night, but it seems to me that Dalhousie students are far more polarized that I had previously realized”.  I reflected on that, then decided I disagreed.  Polarized in the context of politics means opposite ends of the political spectrum.  I’ll grant that the anti-war, anti-corporation, etc. viewpoints are near enough the polar end of the traditional “left-wing” side of politics.  But the right-wing-as-used-today view was not well-represented in that room.  If that room had elected a federal government, the Liberal party would look right-wing.  And I don’t know what Student Appreciation Nights are like these days, but even a small fraction of the ones in my day would convince you moral/family values aren’t at the top of the agenda of campus student leaders.  If anything, the polarity of DSU policies has shifted to the left in recent years.  Take a look at campaign material from 2005 and tell me how many times you use the word “sustainbility”. 
    The other use of polarized is to take opposite sides on an issue: pro-peanuts, anti-peanuts.  Taking for example an anti-war motion, those who opposed it at the AGM aren’t saying “war is awesome”.  They are saying, for example, “war sucks, but it’s pretty far out of our mandate as a student union”.
    I also think it probably WAS the particular turnout; the “people who came to the AGM in support of a particular agenda (be it *for* or *against* the motions)” demographic are a terrible sample set of Dal students.  It’s hard to be polarized when you don’t care.
    Though I disagreed in the end, Horne asked a good question that inspired thought, and I appreciate that.

• One interesting indirect outcome of the AGM is a petition aimed at taking away NSPIRG’s funding, promoted on a new website, www.stopnspirg.org.

• Debogorski was levied two fines tonight, for asserting/implying that people were Nazis.  One was out loud during the AGM, and the other was on punditry.ca after he was removed from the SUB by the police.

• Ok, that’s it for the AGM.

• You might have missed it in the AGM excitement, but candidate posters are available online, though the conversation seems to have boiled down to AmIHotOrNot.

• Sexton debate coverage is not up to Lisa’s level, but I do want to follow-up on last night’s wrap-up.  I congratulated Simms on finding answers to a question he hadn’t been able to answer at the Carleton debate, and said I suspected Evans & Blake could do the same.  The results are in: Evans nailed it, Simms was shaky but got the gist of it, and Glenn Blake didn’t know much more but still wanted to learn.  Two out of three ain’t bad, and Blake will have another shot at demonstrating this willingness to learn at the Thursday debate  (SUB, noon).

• I’ve tried to keep this locked up, but the rage is just too much.  I have a weakness: I cannot read text without spotting most spelling and grammar errors.  This makes my thrice-daily rounds of candidate websites extraordinarily painful.  Forget knowing how to spell, and a typo is a typo, but when did we stop teaching people how to use a spell checker?  If you can’t spell and you don’t have a web browser that spell checks as you type, get one.  Surely you all have noticed this as well:

Edgar Burns: “I Belive they would be well attended … If u have any others then please feel free to email…”
Rob LeForte escapes my wrath, but he also has been writing less than the other candidates.

Shannon Zimmerman: “This is more then just better communication” is fairly prominent, but not bad.
Eric Snow: “encouraged to see so many Sexton students ask very thought prevoking question”, but generally not bad or at least quickly corrected.
Gregory Debogorski: … I don’t need to present evidence here, right?

Hobbs: “maitenance”, “simple terms that is”, “debate on the much contentious issue”, “Studly debate”
Craig Jennex escapes my wrath, plus gets bonus points for spelling “camaraderie” correctly.

• Most candidates have Facebook groups to which they’ve invited all and sundry.  I wrote a little script, as I am prone to do, and it tells me how many members are in each group:

• punditry.ca served an astounding 6,000 pages to 550 unique visitors today.

• Yesterday I was impressed with 53 comments; the total as of midnight-ish was 240 comments.

Mr. Debogorski offers the following statement as an open letter to AGM attendees:

To whom I may have offended during the course of the Dalhousie Student Union’s
annual general meeting on March 11, 2009-

I have spent the last few hours contemplating a comment I made during the course
of the meeting. After an in depth analysis of my morals, philosophies, and
empathy for my colleagues I have concluded that I owe a deep apology to
approximately 78 individuals. I made the statement during a democratic vote
that those voting for the removal of an editor of the Gazette supported Nazism.
My apology stems from the three principles as follows:

First, I am deeply embarrassed at the academic inaccuracy of my statement. My
mother always told me to think before I speak. I can claim that I did just
that, but the picture that came to my mind as I thought fascism was of the Nazi
regime. I pictured the press being drug out of political meetings by police; I
made a parallel to the occurrence in the room at the time. Then as I intended
to state “those who support this are supporting fascism”, I replaced fascism
with Nazism in my wording.
I realise the immense difference in both academic and moral connotation between
the two. It was an incorrect and unfair statement. This does not excuse my slip
of the tongue, nor does it free me from the shame it bears. I apologise.

Second, I have a very deep lingering guilt because of conflicting democratic
morals that have resulted in one weighing more than another. I will explain. In
making the statement, while the vote was occurring, I justified the action
based on the principles “freedom of the press” and “freedom of speech”. I
thought there was an unnecessary and unwarranted oppression on diverse
perspective of the Gazette by removing the opinion’s editor from the meeting.
This justification clashes with a very fundamental moral and philosophical
principle I hold dear- “freedom of thought”. In making the statement, at the
moment it was made, I essentially oppressed other’s opinions. This was unjust
and undemocratic. Therefore, it was immoral in my opinion. I had no right
making the statement at the moment I did. Again and then again, I apologise for
such an undemocratic and unjust act.

Third, and most importantly, I lacked empathy in my words aimed at my
colleagues. At approximately 11:30pm, after the meeting, I arrived at the
entrance to the DSU SUB. Outside I saw a group of students and asked about the
outcome of the meeting. After hearing the results, I asked if people were
offended by my statement. One of the five students seemed emotional upset over
the statement. I was shocked and ashamed by this revelation. My mother always
told me that I should never be ashamed to stand up for what I believe in.
Because of this, other people’s opinions of my beliefs do not bother or affect
me. Perhaps I am insensitive to others because of this; this is a flaw I will
work on. In making the statement, using the incorrect adjective, I have upset
my colleagues without any justification. Again, again, and again I apologise.

I have learned from my mistake and will remember it.
I hereby pledge that such a hurtful statement will not slip from tongue at
another student function again.

Remorseful,

 

Gregory Debogorski

From the profile of Gregory Debogorski; School of Hard Knocks consistently ranked #1 by US News and World Report; Maclean's afraid to even mention it.

As a pundit I expected a few things before this year’s DSU election season began in earnest, including candidates who I have never met/heard of/could care less about trying to do little things (or big, I’m open to whatever) to get on my good side/attention in exchange for a nice review. (HINT: This pretty much is not even a little possible. I basically sit on a panel of Toby Zieglers, we are all fairly idealistic but also have great disdain for everyone and everything.)

It was in the spirit of that expectation that I did not pound my head against the wall when the Facebook group/event spam started yesterday. I love Facebook. I’m not ashamed to admit that it is how I will get to know and judge most of this year’s candidates. Some candidates invited me to their campaign groups personally (two were invites from candidates not on my friend list who for some reason think it is important I know who they are… wonder why?), some were invites from a third party, either was fine. Unfortunately, I will not be joining any of them. I plan to troll them, looking at the discussions and the content, but otherwise why pollute my own profile with things that will be useless in a few days (yeah, I’m just that lazy…)?

Anyway, all these groups got me thinking. Well, social profiling more than thinking I suppose… Can the groups that candidates are members of tell me all about them as people (and thereby influence how I would vote)? After a brief look below the cut are some observations I have just on the various memberships of the presidential participants:

Read more…

Punditry.ca is challenging the presidential candidates to participate in an online debate.  We believe this is an excellent way for a large population to have quick and easy access to an online debate, and depending on its success might expand in future years…

I sent the following email to all three candidates tonight, will update as I hear back.

Update: Eric Snow accepted just minutes after I sent the email.

Update: Gregory Debogorski accepted first thing the next morning.

Update: Shannon Zimmerman also accepted a few minutes later.

We have ourselves a ball game!

Hello <candidate>,

Exciting news!

Punditry.ca is challenging the presidential candidates to an online debate.

We’d like all three of you to join us in an online chat.  The
questions will be issues-based and written by our pundits or submitted
by readers.  The date we have in mind is Sunday afternoon, March 15th.
 (this is traditionally a slow day…)  If and when you agree to
participate, please let us know what times would work best for you.

The debate will be a “live” chat window, with you writing and
responding in real time.  The forum WILL be moderated, and you’ll be
asked to respect the rules.  All punditry.ca readers will be invited
to view it live, but a transcript of the chat session will also be
saved and posted prominently online.

The exact debate rules are pending, but we expect will involve
combined word/time limits.

This event is NOT sanctioned or endorsed by the elections committee.
However, all of your public conduct is still subject to EC rules, and
that includes the debate.

I’ll be posting this e-mail to punditry.ca and letting our readers
know your response.  Please let us know if you accept our “challenge”
soon-ish so we can get everything in place!

Best regards, and best of luck in your campaigns this week.

Mike Smit

This is it. The big stage.  Punditry.ca.

Please pardon any formatting errors as I’m new to this blogging business. Hopefully there’s nothing too unreadable about the following!

 I hit the ground running today, determined to earn my place on this panel alongside so many DSU luminaries. Between 11:30 and 2:00, I walked from building to building, from Studley to Sexton, keen to report the sights and sounds of the election fever that I was sure had swept all three campuses. I marched until the backs of my feet were grated down to two flaps of bloody, mangled skin, driving myself onwards by repeating the mantra that no sacrifice was too great in the quest to witness democracy in its purest form. What inspiring acts of candidate outreach did I see over the course of this epic journey?

1)      Mark Hobbs reading the student pulse in the Killam food court.

2)       Shannon Zimmerman making a screaming retreat from the black hole of student interest that is Carleton campus.

 

…like the fearsome crocodile, he clearly believes in biding his time, feigning catatonia, and waiting for the opportune moment to deliver a fatal strike.

 

All in all, I had a great time meeting and greeting the candidates. I probably would have hung out with them all afternoon, but Mark Coffin started to do that whole “manifesting into a demon and bending the space-time continuum in the process” thing again, so I figured that I’d better catch a bus before things got ugly. 

 

Edgar Burns spelled ANSSA “ANNSA” three times on his website, thus undoing the seal that normally binds the ancient evil within Mark Coffin.

I’m looking forward to the first debate tomorrow, and wish all of the candidates the best of luck!