SUKEY PRESS RELEASE 8am Oct 20th. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Introducing Sukey 3 aka. http://sukey.io

Happy 20 October! Have a great march today. New version of Sukey (v. 3.0), the web app that keeps demonstrators safe, mobile and informed, goes live at 11am in solidarity with London's #Oct20 anti-austerity march.
Sukey.io is a new platform which is designed to keep demonstrators safe, mobile and informed and we hope will spur on previously unprecedented levels of collaboration and truly international digital participation and gestures of solidarity during demonstrations, the world over.

Our Aim. 

What we hope is that people will engage with this framework and start  using Sukey.io to support each other at the demo by completing  'microtasks', much like Amazon's Mechnical Turk Service (i.e. small  digital tasks like tagging a photo or linking to a tweet) in order to  help the people on the ground combat issues such as Police Brutality, Kettling, Excessive State Surveillance to name a few but also to have some fun by rating our favourite banners and protest signs and sharing  our favourite chants or quotes from the day with each other online.

What have we learnt over the last few years? Over the years we have learnt that the best opportunities for making  these key observations are on the ground, in the streets, where these  things are actually happening. Furthermore we have learnt that it can be  so valuable when people on the ground have tactical support online i.e.  support from those with a different perspective- outside the  demonstration (with a large computer screen and a cup of tea no doubt!).  So we want to connect these two groups and help them keep an ongoing dialogue going.

So we made you a webapp on which we have been working really hard in  order to make the best app we can with the limited resources that we  have- we really hope you like it. :) It is designed to make it easier to  use Sukey on the move, even though the signal is not that great and the  internet can often be slow.

Lastly, there are also ways in which people can support a demonstration,  wherever they are in the world by helping to verify information coming  out from the protest by searching and using datasets (e.g. twitter,  twitpic, google street view and google maps searches). By participating  you can help solve a real need of people on the ground. For example some  groups of people will take photos of banners and placards, while some  others rate them. Some people will observe which roads have been closed  or are slow to travel down and report them as such while will suggest  alternative routes.

Introduction / Theory

Sukey.io, in concept, could be viewed as a sequence of Stimulus:Response  mappings which have been devised in order to help demonstrators  collaborate effectively during a demonstration.

Example:

Stimulus0: We find a tweet online which says "there is a kettle forming on Whitehall, OMG, get out of there!"

Response0: We launch a localised (to whitehall's co-ordinates and the  immediate locality) micro questionnaire which simply asks: "Is there a  Kettle here?" and can you take a photo of it?

Stimulus1: We receive photos and verification of the fact that the kettle is on

Response1: We can then faithfully tweet out a report that the kettle is indeed happening.