The document discusses the use of open-source tools and technologies to connect communities and address social issues through crowd-sourced data and real-time information sharing. It highlights various use cases including disaster response, food redistribution, and missing person alerts, as well as the technical approaches and challenges involved in creating effective platforms. Additionally, it raises critical perspectives on the potential side effects of technology and the importance of engaging with local communities directly.

1. Ubiquitous Angels
Open Source Bridge Portland Oregon June 2009
http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/246
twitter.com/anselm
blog.makerlab.org
anselm hook

2. What I’ll cover
• A look at other similar sensor efforts
• A little bit of technicals
• Critical perspectives

4. If
• we could see our neighborhoods better
• There might be an opportunity to participate
• We could better help people in need
• We could connect people together with
similar needs
• We could crowd-source social problems
• We all know this.

6. A big use case
• #iranelection
• where are the protests?
• are there specific instances of vote fraud?
• who are the key twitterers?
• are there specific things we can do?
• are there local people who can help?

8. A smaller use case
• Restaurants often dump food every night
• Gleaners try to collect food
• How can we connect dumpers with
gleaners?

9. Other use cases
• My child is missing.
• Somebody just stole my bike.
• Can somebody give me a ride?
• Does anybody have a place where I can stay?
• Car pooling?
• I’d like somebody to share my war stories
with.

10. Crisis at many levels

11. Where is the real time
map of us?

12. Hard to Automate
• ‘Automated maps of feeds look like
database barf on a map’ - Chris Blow

14. Ushahidi Swift Initiative
• blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/tag/swift/
• a crisis listening tool
• the Mumbai Crisis for example
• electoral fraud events such as in Iran
• the upcoming quake in San Francisco
• crowd source filtering to eliminate noise
• crisis editors mark posts up with metadata
• first responders can see filtered views

15. Ushahidi Swift

16. Swift Control Panel

17. Code and Praxis

18. A software stack for a
civic lens
• search - to help restrict the firehose that is twitter and co.
• aggregation - as tuned by search
• reaping - throwing away old data as an ongoing process
• actual fetching content from twitter and co.
• geolocation of content by any means possible
• natural language parsing for semantic content and meaning
• language translation from foreign languages to english
• presentation layer for the sit-at-home-view and in-the-field views
• curatorial role in marking data up or changing metadata
• first responder views, feedback and loop closure

19. Roles
• Participant - somebody involved in an issue
• Reporter - as an on the ground witness
• Curator - acting as an editor to filter reports
• Matchmaker - matching reports with
potential responders
• Responder - going into the field to help
resolve a situation.

20. John Nunemaker’s
Twitter Gem
• http://github.com/jnunemaker/twitter
• http://apiwiki.twitter.com
• h = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(name,pass)
• twitter = Twitter::Base.new(h)
• results = twitter.user_timeline(:id =>‘joi’)
• results.each { |twit| puts twit.location }

21. Social Graph is easy
• twitter.friends(:id => ‘joi’ )
• Try to rate limit queries
• Build your own model of the social graph
• Easy to do, crucial to provide subjectivity
• An alternative is to go through YQL
• Social graph issues underpin many projects

22. Fetching social graph

23. YQL for the win
• yql = “http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=”
• query = “select * from party where id = ‘joi’ or id =
‘meedan’ or id = ‘bob’” ...
• schema = “use ‘http://angel.makerlab.org/yql/
twitter.user.timeline.xml’ as party;”
• url = “#{yql}#{url_escape(schema+query)}
• url = url + “format=json”;
• data = JSON.parse(open(url).read)
• data[“query”][“results”].each { |i| puts i.title }
• a higher rate limit ~may~ allow more data access

24. Metacarta Geolocation
• request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(‘/webservices/
GeoTagger/JSON/basic?version=1.0.0&doc=banff!’)
• request.basic_auth name,pass
• h = Net::HTTP.start(‘ondemand.metacarta.com’)
• response = h.request(request)
• data = JSON.parse(response.body)
• latitude = data[“locations”][0][“Centroid”][“Latitude”]

25. Yahoo Placemaker
• geolocating posts by brute force
• url = URI.parse(‘http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document’)
• args = {‘documentContent’ => ‘banff’,
‘documentType’ => ‘text/plain’,
‘appid’=>mysecretappkey }
• r = Net::HTTP.post_form(url,args)
• doc = Hpricot::XML(response.body)
• latitude = (node/:latitude).innerHTML
• longitude = (node/:longitude).innerHTML

27. acts_as_solr for search
• picky and brittle
• doesn’t play well with others
• can geo-constrain searches more or less
• query = “volunteer lat:[42 TO 60]”
• Model.rebuild_solr_index()
• results = Model.find_by_solr(query)
• results.docs { |data| puts data.name }

28. engtagger for meaning
extraction
• engtagger.rubyforge.org
• phrase = “is anyone awake out there? i just got
mugged in front of my house and could really use
help calling the police”
• tagger = EngTagger.new
• tagged = tgr.add_tags(phrase)
• nouns = tagger.get_nouns(tagged)
• {“police”=>1,”help”=>1, ... }

29. Clustering Approaches
to clump activity
• Carrot2
• Amazon Turk
• Human ‘volunteer turk’ approach
• Contextual Network Graphs
• Latent Semantic Indexing

30. Carrot2
• project.carrot2.org
• Submit your requests directly via http
• Can only cluster 1000 documents at a time
• Used as a way to get even more metadata
• Forms clusters dynamically

32. Brief Comments on
Visualization
• Views are political
• Subjectivity is crucial
• Speed of user interface; probably gamelike
• Tactical; showing immediate context
• http://map.cartagen.org for example

34. Still looking for similar
efforts - any advice?
• I call this class of services ‘real time
brokerages’. But I don’t see many of them.
• Craigslist?
• Shizzow?
• IceCondor?
• Other?

35. Criticism
• Side effects often dominate over intended consequences of any project or endeavor.
• Abstract views may make us callous or may badly reflect ground truth.
• Ignorance is bliss. The world is filled with sob stories. Best to not dwell?
• Such services may be used solely for the most banal aspirations and goals.
• Struggle may be important - making things too easy may harm fitness and lower
diversity of skills and abilities over long term.
• What about poor people who are outside of any implied technological social
network?
• Why not just help people around you?
• Any technology should go hand in hand with day to day personal practice that is
unmediated?
• Feedback loops may be created that accelerate and disrupt society.
• Virtual and visual only for curators; not tactile; uses only one sense. A concern?

36. links
http://swiftapp.org/
http://crisismapping.ning.com/
http://ushahidi.com
http://ncfoodnet.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unthinkingly/3507131912/
http://cartagen.net
http://blog.twittervotereport.com/
http://blog.ushahidi.com/?s=swift
http://www.qapture.net/lists/
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/12/social-media-monitoring-tools.html
http://tinker.com/users/find/?findName=&findEmail=&findLocation=banff&profType=
http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/04/02/patent-monkey-geographic-cell-messaging-with-squareloop/
http://www.dantynan.com/2009/04/02/twitter-added-to-federal-emergency-response-network/ ( April Fools Gag )
http://stephensonstrategies.com/directory-of-major-blog-posts/boy-did-i-underestimate-twitters-value-in-a-disaster/
http://www.comminit.com/en/node/290987/307
http://yvoschaap.com/twitterthoughts/?map=1
http://mashable.com/2009/03/16/twitter-visualizations/
http://theeword.blogspot.com/2009/06/best-twitter-applications-for-social.html
http://monitter.com/
http://maphawk.blogspot.com/2009/01/geographic-search-engine-for-news.html
http://muti.co.za/static/newsmap.html
http://www.planetizen.com/node/38227
http://www.localtweeps.com/
http://keithhopper.com/taxonomy/term/28
http://keithhopper.com/blog/finding-twitterstars
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?Location=portland%2C+oregon&radius=15&_render=rss&_id=2fdf06974be88f13a63937fb4d36e499
http://delicious.com/tag/twitter+map
http://www.twitip.com/twellowhood-find-local-twitter-users/
http://www.tweepz.com/feed?q=loc%3Abanff&C=
http://www.twitterlocal.net/ ( old )
http://www.frontlinesms.com/

37. thanks
http://github.com/
anselm/angel
http://github.com/
anselm/SpinnyGlobe