[Air-L] Proposal for a New Twitter Data Consortium

[Stuart Shulman]

I have an idea for a new data consortium to restore some semblance of
reliable Twitter data access going forward. It would be a new model,
including some services, to get the data from Meltwater on a scheduled
basis, along with DiscoverText access, and it would require up front near
term payments to mitigate the risk of signing an expensive contract with
all payments up front. I need representatives of what would be a founding
set of research groups, departments, colleges, or non-profits with a data
budget to contact me as soon as possible.

Think of it as a CSA model (Community Supported Agriculture) for data. If a
set of groups, departments, colleges, or universities can spend $10,000 for
one year, we can lock in Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comments, blogs, and
other data source access with powerful filtering capabilities. I would be
your data farmer, collaborating on query requests, and working with the
single access point to gather Meltwater data for everyone in the consortium
and loading it to DiscoverText for collaborative analysis.

This might be a good time to contact your Chair, Dean, or VP for Research
asking if there is a readily available pot of money on campus to lock-in
Twitter data access going into the next academic/US election year. It would
not be perfect, seamless, or fully unlimited, however it is a solid
foothold for keeping the academic lens focused on the data no matter what
happens to the APIs that we have seen come and go. While some academics do
retain access, most are locked out. This is a way to get locked in for
teaching and research. As far as I can tell, Meltwater is a legitimate,
legal, stable, 2,000-employee firm with a strong legacy agreement in place
with Twitter.

Drop me a line if you want to go over how this might work.

~Stu