Resilient Community: Online Crime Watch and Alerts

Seattle 911 Police Blog has an interesting example of community information sharing here: PDFs: Other crime alerts sent this month to UW students.

In that example the UW is sending crime incident alerts to students. Here are my examples of extending that communication style:

1. Police precincts offer an email alert system to local residents, with info duplicated on a website.
2. A cooperative second tier is created for citizens to share information, sometimes augmenting the police alerts and other times referring to incidents or suspicious conduct unknown to police.
3. Seattle has neighborhood association offices, one in each neighborhood. It would be nice to keep the physical/real offices open, and augment with an online version. The physical office could even serve the online version by providing a place to sign up as a member of the online community, as a way to keep random people outside the true community from participating in the forum.
4. These community information systems need a true residents only layer of activity, and a wall-less layer where information is available to the whole world, both the specific incident information and the community's communication style. This keeps trolls out of my neighborhood discussion space, but makes the whole operation open source for the world.

I just wrote an entry on civic wrangling, and John Robb just wrote about community security here. The UW email alert example and my extensions are a more concrete, incremental treading through the topic space.

This part of the blog entry goes to another level related to the crime watch/resilient community topic. I can anticipate one hurdle to open sourcing a community's problems, big property owners might see this as negative PR and potential for lowering their property values. This would be the opposition point between absentee investors versus people truly in the community. For the investor, the problem space is all abstract, with marketing spin the main means of improving the property. For those truly living in the residence, the problem space is not abstract, with personal safety, transportation, access to grocery supplies, and a million other pragmatisms making or breaking the situation.

A resilient community will not PR itself out of problems.

Christian Science Monitor -Neighbors on Patrol

The New Input Output : Civic Wrangling

Take a look at the photo below, and think about any and every .gov, placing /developers at the end of the URL.

police.gov/developers fcc.gov/developers utah.us/developers fema.gov/developers

Beyond "developers", imagine /wiki, /blog, or Youtube channels ( which allow comments and video response, which makes it as much an input as an output).

Over at whitehouse.gov/blog/ Macon Philips, Director of New Media, writes : "One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."

Listen up: Government for the people, by the people has lept from a well wishing aspiration to something we can truly wrangle with. By wrangle I mean Bruce Sterling's vision:

"Wranglers are the class of people willing to hassle with Spimes. And it is a hassle. An enormous hassle. But its a fruitful hassle. It is the work of progress. Handled correctly, it can undo the harm of the past and enhance what is to come."

--When Blobjects Rule the Earth/SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004

I know a kind of people that dislike "fruitful hassle" -they are the people who shy away from learning something new, understanding the complex, working, and delayed gratification. But these kinds of people are rare. More prevalent is the little bits of this in everyone, or simply life circumstances that make civic wrangling difficult. Time to grow up. All good things, all real things, have a learning curve and require a commitment of time.

I would like to note the passing of a certain social thesis to the dustbin of history. In Better Together -Restoring American Community one chapter focused on Craigslist and asked if online community enhanced/enabled social capital. The authors disqualified online civic activity as a positive.

Bye Bye "Better Together", and every academic or NGO activist invested in opposing online civic activism. Bye, wave bye now, c-ya, bye, bye bye.

While mentioning those being left as the train of progress, power and glory leaves the station, I must mention the significant number of anti-computer/anti-internet students I attended college with at Evergreen State College. I especially remember one guy at my last house party in Olympia. He was extremely proud he did not know a single thing about using a computer. A girl in the room was charged with pride of association while say "yeah, he doesn't know how to type in one, what to do at all with one". These kids were usually from higher end middle-class families, raised on the values of 60's counterculture, and were taking the values to a Luddite extreme. I was one of the hot-dog computer science students on campus, often considered uncool or undermining the political revolution by my use of technology.

My government just abandoned those kids. My government just adopted the way I communicate. The Luddite end of the Left lost, and I won. We won.