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.
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