All posts by Joachim

Vuvuzelas and hereMe!

By Joachim to Global Blog on February 5, 2011 at 8:44 pm

Remember those days during the last world cup when we all downloaded the Vuvuzela app? Great fun, clear mission, no questions asked.

Actually, many apps are of that nature: solving or managing a specific task. That’s why you have on average 50 apps on your Smartphone. For almost everything you can find an app…

Where does hereMe! fit in?

hereMe! is not an app to solve or manage a specific task.

To begin with, hereMe! is a communication and information client server platform, the clients being the mobile phones.

It is a characteristic feature of platforms to enable users (or systems) for certain general categories of tasks. Operating systems e.g. enable you to write and execute applications.

hereMe! enables you to execute a variety of use cases and prohibits a few others.

Let’s start with unsupported use cases. The most prominent one is this: you cannot use hereMe! to post private messages or status updates to your network of friends.

That’s an intentional design decision. We know there are many social networking applications that already enable you to do exactly that, the gold standard being Facebook.

Hence, hereMe is an open platform, YOU addressing a (largely) anonymous crowd of people.

Remember the saying: all politics is local? It is a kind of guiding principle for the kind of information or statements we are enabling and encouraging on the hereMe! platform:

do local reporting with a taste of global impact.

That’s why we pay attention to two measures that will become increasingly important in future versions of the system: the noteworthy and the reply count.

The noteworthy count measures the appreciation your report receives from the community. The more people find your report noteworthy, the better this report fits into the general goal of hereMe: creating local reports with (a taste of) global impact resonating in the crowd.

The reply count can be viewed as a kind of Page rank inside hereMe! The more user reply to your report, the more entertaining and engaging your report is and the more it enhances the overall value of the system. Later versions of hereMe! might offer sorting reports e.g. by their “value of impact” or “relevance” . To make these adjectives quantifiable we need measurable quantities like noteworthy and reply count, and probably additional concepts.

Those high impact reports also play an important part in formulating and outsourcing tasks to a (largely) unknown crowd. They might be an open call for action, for spontaneous group organization or provide valuable guidance for further crowd-based activities.

That’s what is called crowdsourcing: tasks or actions are not outsourced to an individual or a group of known subcontractors, but are given collectively to a crowd.

hereMe! is a platform that enables and encourages crowdsourcing. The crowd has all information it needs by supplying enough qualified local reports, relating it to space and time patterns and providing feedback to itself thru replying to reports. This cycle of locally generated information helps to emerge global patterns on which collective crowd action is possible.

Key ingredient for a cyclic process like that is not only the information gathering, but also meaningful ways to select noteworthy and relevant information. The first step to that has been implemented in our FEED concept, but we are fully aware that there is room for improvement.

Creating information is one thing, but leaving users drowning in tons of messages without the real means of selecting relevant information for ME in MY currently given situation can render the whole platform as almost useless. It is one of our goals to provide the best possible and user centric UI for selecting information that is relevant from both, an individual as well as an crowd point of view, thus making hereMe! not only a huge repository of locally relevant data, events, things , but also making it a valuable tool for crowdsourcing. It is part of that endeavor to recognize the locality of data and events and simultaneously respect and make visible the global correlation that all of these data most likely have. We hope to achieve that by supplying more and more metadata so that we can not only collect data but talk about them at a semantic level.

We sum up:

• hereMe! is a general purpose platform, lowering the barriers for individuals to share their noteworthy stories…worldwide.
• hereMe! is a tool for collecting, indexing, organizing and making transparent the local information around you by simultaneously respecting, and enhancing the long range correlation that typically comes with that information. We prefer calling it micro reporting with a (taste of) global impact.
• hereMe! democratizes access, reporting and information and encourages crowd sourcing.
• hereMe! is a great tool for all kinds of mobile-for-change (M4Change) projects, citizen reporting initiatives. See MobileActive for a great variety of use cases, all of which can be handled in a unified way by hereMe!
• hereMe! is a useful add-on for many volunteer projects to showcase their work ,spread the word of their course of action and engage the public through great reporting on hereMe!
• hereMe! is a valuable platform to be used in any kind of disaster and humanitarian relief. We’ll soon support “low level” voice and SMS input channels to support situations and regions where the infrastructure does not allow for high bandwidth access or provides no access at all for mobiles.

Last but not least let’s review a fun topic:

The Urban Speaker Project

Take a look and listen. Maybe we should rent some billboards and urban speaker installations and whenever a report pops up around such a device you can see and hear it, a wonderful implementation of our slogan hereMe!…yes we hear you.

But don’t get me wrong: the Vuvuzela app was great fun and had 3+ million downloads.

We have to catch up…let’s do it together!

10,278 Comments

Announcing a Global ALWAYS-ON Platform for Micro Reporting

By Joachim to Global Blog on January 17, 2011 at 9:27 am

A couple of days ago the world observed the one year anniversary of the tragic and devastating earthquake in Haiti.

On that first anniversary day, the Knight Foundation published an interesting report: 

 New Media and Humanitarian Relief: Lessons from Haiti. Among other findings, the report shows: 

Relief workers crowd-sourced information – and acted on it: Reports of trapped people and medical emergencies collected by text were plotted on an online map then used by relief workers. 

SMS texts broadcast critical information to Haitians: Cell phone companies, relief groups and media created and used the code 4636 to send messages to tens of thousands about important public health issues. 

Volunteers created open-source maps as guides: Using handheld GPS devices, volunteers created up-to-date maps to help guide humanitarian groups and the public trying to navigate affected areas.

There are countless other examples of natural disasters, war zone catastrophes, shooting sprees at schools, malls or corner events, human rights violations, election fraud situations, environmental impacts and more where immediate and geographically accurate and fast reporting – accessible to everyone – can help save lives, guide first responders, restore basic human rights and help protect the environment.

But looking beyond those most dramatic events, we find numerous examples where geo-tagged micro-information reported by individuals can be the seed for a greater and good cause.

It might be the dangerous crosswalk in your neighborhood that has already caused too many accidents.  Wouldn’t it be great to just take your smart phone, add a short text, attach a video or picture and submit this to an ALWAYS-ON worldwide news service? In doing so you have planted the seed for further community action: people can comment, can write their own reports, and over time a picture will emerge that might help authorities to finally make the case for that missing traffic light. 

Or what about the beautiful old tree on your street corner that you’ve always wanted to share, because it makes your neighborhood special and is in no official tourist guide but worthwhile to be known? Write a small report, attach a video and picture or tell your story in an audio recording. 

Think of pollution or other environmental problem somewhere: you see it, you report it, geo-tag and attach video, and thus help to spontaneously organize a crowd to clean up the mess. 

Remember the DARPA Red Balloon Network Challenge? An experiment to challenge and find good ways for wide-area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time- critical problems. The key to master that challenge is an ALWAYS-ON wide-area accessible platform that geo-tags information automatically and makes it accessible to everyone at any moment in time. 

Each of us can easily find plenty of examples of that kind: objects, observations, events, occasions that keep us engaged, that speak to us and where we feel the urgency to broadcast that special feeling and excitement beyond the inner circle of family and friends, because we feel it’s for a higher cause and we can help to advance that cause if only enough people can join. 

Hence, going beyond those status updates you post on Facebook, beyond those Foursquare check-ins and those “going out to lunch” tweets you do on Twitter, there is different category of information that becomes useful in a broader social context: information that is almost worthless if you keep it confined to your followers but becomes enormously powerful and interesting if it is out there accessible on an open ALWAYS-ON platform. 

In other words, the events in our daily lives, big or small, can become a part of a worldwide, unified and ALWAYS-ON platform. With the power of mobile computing, we can share, filter, and intelligently consume this information in a new way:

 hereMe!…yes we hear you!

The hereMe! platform differs from existing update services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others because it is a public, geography-based network designed to facilitate micro-reporting by YOU: in daily situations, in extraordinary situations, in good times and in bad times, in peaceful times and in times where seconds make all the difference. 

We can all become news creators and consumer at the same time.

hereMe! is a platform that enables us all to plant the seed for crowd-sourced information, creating a dialog of the many, providing democratic grassroots reporting and information access, across borders, day and night, everywhere. 

A platform well suited for spontaneous crowd organizations, initiating collective actions, based on local events having global outreach. 

Best of all, it’s completely free, no distracting or annoying ads, a platform easy to handle, a platform enabling you and me to stay focused on what matters to us. 

hereMe! is currently available on iPhone with Android and Symbian versions coming soon. Now it’s YOUR turn to get involved and become a hereMe! grassroots reporter. 

hereMe!…yes we hear you!

10,105 Comments