Neve and I have been reading Shotguns & Sweetpotatoes (on the NIJOT blogroll!) mostly because it is a good place for reviews of books on disaster preparedness, low-impact living, and the like. Mr. & Mrs. SNS are generally looking at the large-scale disasters, but I wonder if Inauguration Day isn’t going be small to medium-sized challenge here in Boston. If a Coastie from Virginia is willing to jump in on my “federal worker walk-out” idea, what is the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade going to be up to? Whether it is anarchists, terrorists, or security contractor/mercenaries in the streets, I’d like to know that my city is ready and willing to share its information and resources with it’s citizens.
Somerville, just across the town line from us, has made a pretty good step with their 311 system. This lets the citizens act as the eyes and ears of the city, to let them know about things that need to be dealt with but aren’t enough of an emergency to warrant a 911 call. On the other end, the system sends out mass-phone calls to city residents about snow emergencies, road closures, and the like. A friend of ours has dubbed it the ‘city AI’.
I love the idea of these systems, and unlike the federal government under the current regime, I trust the city governments to use them in the interests of their citizens. However, there are a lot of communities stacked one on top of the other in greater Boston. I wonder how hard it would be to get something comparable set up for the stay-at-home mothers and nannies (letting you know what playgrounds have been plowed, advertising promotional events, mapping stroller-friendly routes after snow storms). Or, jumping back to Inauguration Day, what would it take to build a system for all the protesters and and would-be insurgents to meet, share information, and track any possible blowback from the Powers That Be?
There’s gotta be some MIT kid out there just dying to try this hack.
3 responses so far ↓
Archy // January 10, 2008 at 10:35 am |
[shrug] The tech is the easy part. All you need is a server, a DNS entry, and a LAMP setup. With PHP Cake (or Ruby on Rails, if you’re into self-abuse), you can probably throw together a website that can register and collate all the info in a couple of hours. (Not a pretty one, of course, but functional.) Trickier to get the phone interface, but web and email access are almost trivial these days. With the proliferation of iPhones and Google-based phones, even your in-the-street protesters can be on the grid while on the march.
BTW, classes are nearly upon us here. My responses will likely be (exponentially) less frequent.
paulmcneil // January 11, 2008 at 8:49 am |
Ah, but can you get the posts from those mobile phones to include GPS Coordinates? I know all phones have ‘em now, and several of the smart-phones let you see the location of your friends in-network.
Is that information available and/or hackable?
Archy // January 12, 2008 at 6:06 pm |
Maybe. That’s really outside my area. I suppose if you can see the GPS coords, then you could have a manual entry/cut’n'paste field for them on the web entry widget. As to automatic GPS upload — dunno. That’s all systems level stuff. There are people to do these things. Those people are not me.