The East Village Idiot
is a popular blog for “bitching and whining, comically” about New
York. It frequently features postings complaining about such things as
the condition of New York City’s streets.
While the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) provisions data about local conditions top down, New York City’s 311
is, at least in part, a bottom up solution to gathering information.
New York City’s 311 service is a telephone hotline to access municipal
government services. In addition to using the hot-line to request
information or find out about City benefits, 311 also functions as a
complaint hotline to report street conditions, such as broken street
lights and severe potholes. South Korea offers a similar one-stop-shopping for public complaints as does the UK ePetitions website. The City then reports out annual statistics on the most frequent inquiries on an aggregated and neighborhood basis.
FixMyStreet
is a beta project in the UK developed by mySociety.org, a charitable
project which builds demonstration websites for civic and community
purposes. FixMyStreet, which also created the ePetitions website,
allows a resident to enter a UK postcode or street name, to pinpoint a
problem on a map of that area, attach a photo of the broken street
light or pothole or protruding tree roots and enter details of the
problem. MySociety then sends the reported broken paving or abandoned
vehicle complaint to the appropriate town council for repair and
resolution.
Launched almost a decade ago, Connecticut Policy and Economic Council’s CityScan
project, does not simply encourage complaining. It goes beyond the
“bitching and whining” of the blogs and the hotlines and online
petitions and, though the much older project, did more than simply
channel complaints to government like FixMyStreet.
CityScan did one better by actively working with the institutions of
local government in Connecticut’s most troubled cities. Instead of
dumping information on them, the group worked out a strategy for
collaboration between the institutions of government and community
members. City Scan asked town officials to tell them (not the other
way around) the number of derelict land-use sites, graffiti-defaced
buildings and run-down parks the municipality will clean up each
month. It them mobilized young people and seniors in their own
neighborhoods to use digital cameras and handheld computers to hold the
city accountable to its promise. City Scan used the state of the art
technology — which at that time were digital cameras and
first-generation PDAs — to prepare visual reports and maps created from
the data. The City of Gainesville, too, gives citizens the technology
to create geographic maps and plot crime incidents from the community policy blotter.
City Scan does not view citizens as simply passive consumers of
information but as active collaborators in the work of governance. The
CityScan neighborhood groups worked with and held local government
officials accountable while collaborating on the clean-up effort.
CityScan offered the additional benefit of bringing youth and seniors
together towards a common goal.
Projects like CityScan that directly connect the communities to the
institutional decision-makers are still the rarity. Despite
technological advances, entrepreneurs are still creating complaint
websites and blogs largely because we still cannot imagine for
ourselves that WE not government are the locus for social change and innovation. Benedict Anderson in his influential book, Imagined Communities,
writes of the need to transcend geography or other equally artificial
boundaries and instead to imagine who needs to be part of a community.
This is consonant with a systems approach to envisioning who is
motivated to want to solve a problem. By starting with the problem
(not with the jurisdiction of a particular agency) and thinking across
disciplinary boundaries, institutional scale and silos, we can solve a
problem in myriad ways, bringing law and technology to bear in tandem.
An environmental effort to improve land use conditions can be tackled
both through traditional rulemaking and legislation but change would
happen faster — and be less fraught by political manipulations — by
also by using software to do the practices of environmental action,
including information gathering, evaluation, drafting and organizing
collective action.
As CityScan demonstrated, the question of land use is not only an
issue for lawyers, government officials or even relevant industries but
one that could be addressed to the unlikely community of teens and
seniors. They were able to participate in solving the problem as well
as pointing it out. Now imagine adopting an approach like that of
CityScan but using the latest tools available to us today, replacing
old cameras with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology.
Jeff Jonas beat me to the punch by writing about Photosynth. the coolest tech thing since sliced virtual bread, which we were discussing at Legal Futures. Take a look
at this video about “Photosynth” presented by Blaise Aguera y
Arcas at a TED conference last year.
Breath-taking.
Photosynth
seamlessly stitches together photos taken by any photographer with any
equipment and at any scale (from detailed to panned). Photosynth, for
example, can assemble a large collection of photos from Flickr or any
source, analyze them for similarities (it doesn't need tags) and
assemble them to create, effectively, a three-dimensional recreation of
a space. Here's what Microsoft Live Labs, which acquired Photosynth, says about the project:
* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
* Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend
The uninteresting reaction to Photosynth is to say: monumental privacy, copyright and trademark issues. Oy! But who cares.
As Jeff writes: "Now imagine the process of stitching together not
just digital images … but all available data – across disparate data
types (e.g., structured, unstructured text, images, video, audio,
etc.)."
This is the future of the multiverse or, as Richard Bartle once put it at the State of Play conference (here
more precisely) the Microverse, the ability to create our own virtual
worlds. Its just a matter of time before I can walk through and
interact in the spaces created and re-created by photosynth and can
integrate more than just visual information.
I can't help but think about the civic applications of this
photo-documentation technology, which could create the ability for
communities to record and document their own environmental and land-use
conditions at any scale.
Photosynth recognizes patterns and edges in order to align the
images and create lifelike three-dimensional experiences of a place,
allowing easy zooming to show the neighborhood and the smallest details
of graffiti and garbage. Photosynth and the evolving visual
technologies make it easy to do photo-documention of a community
without any prior coordination or even tagging and labeling of the
photos. Meanwhile the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood
Indicators Partnership (NNIP) furthers the development and use of
neighborhood information systems — databases and mapping systems about
local conditions — in local policy making and community building. With
partnerships everywhere from Des Moines, Iowa to Camden, New Jersey,
the aim is to revitalize local communities. But NNIP delivers data
“top down” and does not involve communities in gathering data for
themselves as they could do more effectively with Photosynth.
Because the software itself recognizes that a disparate collection
of images are all of the same subject, puts them together, it creates
an easy way not only to grow the store of data but to produce
accountability and target clean up efforts like CityScan. Meanwhile Helping Hands: Computer Support for Community-Maintained Artifacts of Lasting Value,
a research project launched by Prof. John Riedl of University of
Minnesota aims to make it easy for communities to create and maintain
valuable resources like Wikipedia. They deploy a recommender system to
help people find parts of the project they will be most able and
willing to improve. State laws
requiring assessment of environmental impact or impact on community
character may offer a useful framework and guideline for collection and
a benchmark against which to measure improvements.
Neither law nor technology alone are enough, however, but a systems
approach allows both to be brought to bear to create greater
effectiveness and opportunities for engagement, not for its own sake,
but to solve a problem in the world at scale.
