Friday, 12 October 2012

How now, brown cow?

Where did Sukey come from?

It was dubbed 'the anti-kettling app' and received international media attention in 2011. It attempts to keep people safe mobile and informed during a demonstration. We achieve this by promoting collaboration between people on the demo that are using Sukey, and people not at the demo via social networking, to share reports and observations which can be independently verified by a team inside and outside the demo (some are on the ground) and then broadcast back to the entire crowd. We believe  in information for information's sake and try to introduce as little 'editorial bias' in rebroadcasting as possible. We also produced a map showing where the police were kettling protestors so that people had a better sense of what was going on.

Where are we going?

The information flows are now more dynamic and interesting as we enter into the 3rd generation of the app and we can now engage thousands of people from all around the world who may just simply watching the demo at home or from work, using social media or live-streams, to help the people on the ground by preforming 'mechanical-turk-esque' micro tasks. These are small digital tasks which may involve adding or correcting waypoints on a map, taking photos (on the ground), rating a photo, tagging a photo, doing a google search, voting on the perceived veracity of a piece of information or looking on google street view to help find things. This is all very exciting and I would ask those interested to get in touch to help us BETA. Email: sukey.org@gmail.com twitter: @sukeyio

Connecting People

It is really interesting and important to connect people at a given demonstation with people not at the demonstration and give a 'loose-knit collective of clicktivists' something to do in order to help the demonstrators in a tangible way. This will lead to compelling stories of collaboration between people from all over the world who identify with the struggle of fellow people from other countries who are being silenced, coerced and beaten for peacefully protesting against their states. Even better when these stories are received and read by the people that were helped, then those in the countries that were helped will turn around and return the favour when the time comes. So we want to be the first group to really pay it forwards and start helping people to stay well informed at demonstrations and see if we can start a trend which will help all people collaborate to facilitate peaceful protest in this digital age.

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