Future:Media:Change

We have a lot of snow in DC.  Yesterday I saw people in snow shoes walking own the street.  The grocery stores are empty and I haven’t seen asphalt for at least a week now.  Trying to dig yourself out of the snow mess can be a major challenge, so the good people at PICnet devised a smart way of using crowd sourcing to help Washingtonians beat the winter.

Snowmageddon – The Clean-Up. …[hopes] to tap the power of the crowd to help Washington, D.C., dig itself out from under the blizzard that still blankets that city and others on the East Coast with snow. Apparently, the deluge has challenged some of the official response teams.

Ozimek, the founder and CEO of open source web-development firm Picnet, and a friend who works for him assembled the Snowmageddon site using Ushahidi. It’s a PHP/MySQL application that plots location, time and descriptive metadata on a map, in this case to describe snow problems and snow solutions.-Wired

You might remember Ushahidi was used to map out disaster areas during the Haiti earthquake. While the Snowmageddon site hasn’t yet taken off it does raise hopes for two aspects of technology for good; crowd-sourcing and community mapping.

As online tools become easier to adapt and smartphone technology becomes more pervasive, the ability for individuals to create quick portals that map out problem areas in a community are going to hopefully become more widespread.  The problem as shown with Snowmageddon however is that none of the information has been centralized.  If I didn’t read Wired I would have never heard about the Snowmageddon site.  Is this something that requires a public-private partnership with the government?

As in all cases, it depends.  For examples like Snowmageddon where the initiative is truly grassroots crowd-sourcing, you wouldn’t need and probably wouldn’t want government interaction.  You just want to link up problem areas with concerned citizens who are able to do something.  But what if the problems are potholes, or excessive speeding on a street?  Citizens aren’t going to be able to handle that themselves.  A powerful community mapping tool that links directly with local government would be needed in that case to not only unleash the power of the crowd, but tap into the resources of the government.

I’m sure being cooped up in my apartment is making me miss something here, what’s the solution??