
Sukey - A tool for non-violent demonstrations - kilian
http://sukey.org/
======
rst
Briefly, this is a map overlay which pools reports on police activity
surrounding demonstrations, designed to counter the "kettling" confinement
tactics used by the London police in recent student protests. Best link for
those who want to see how it works: their tutorial at
<http://sukey.org/tutorial>

Some of the press coverage, like the Economist piece here, is also oddly more
informative than the web site itself:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/demonstration...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/demonstrations)

Unfortunately, their attitude towards security, at least as expressed in the
FAQ, seems slightly worrisome. For groups without funding or world-class
expertise "we'll release the code when we think it's OK" is a slower, less
sure path to trustworthiness than "here it is now; please tell us what's wrong
with it." But they claim to have (unnamed) experts on the project; I guess
we'll see how soon they do a source release, and what shows up when they do...

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wardrox
Am I an idiot for not have a clue what this actually does after both watching
the video and reading the FAQ?

As far as I can tell it's hyper-local news app tailored to specific protests.
People send them messages and they send updates out? Which I guess is useful?

~~~
bnchdrff
The tutorial ( <http://sukey.org/tutorial> ) does a better job of explaining
things.

It's a tool to aggregate location/safety statuses submitted by many people in
the same protest.

I'm interested in how the site verifies reports. The purpose of this app is
very similar to Ushahidi, which has some basic vetting tools for
editors/organizers.

In the tutorial, it just says something like "sukey will check your report and
broadcast it" -- how will this look if thousands of people submit reports at
once?

~~~
JonnieCache
_> how will this look if thousands of people submit reports at once?_

This app will be used during specific events, not all the time. If there's a
protest with many thousands of people involved, and this app becomes well used
enough to attract thousands of reports at once, it is not unreasonable to
imagine a good few hundred trusted, trained volunteers to crosscheck reports.

If you have thousands of reporters, you will be able to get hundreds of
volunteer moderators. These are student activists remember :)

~~~
gnosis
Who watches the watchers?

~~~
JonnieCache
Just let them flag reports so they are hidden by default, rather than deleting
them. Then everyone can watch everyone else, UK activists are used to that
now: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/22/undercover-
police-c...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/22/undercover-police-
cleared-sex-activists)

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JonnieCache
_"Sukey is brought to you by the students and supporters who formed the
technical team at the UCL Occupation"_

Brilliant! For those unaware these were the students who occupied some of the
buildings at the University College London for about a month over christmas in
protest at the education funding cuts. Good to see they managed to fit some
hacking in there between fighting the university management trying to evict
them and giving webcasted interviews to tv reporters.

<http://blog.ucloccupation.com/demands/>

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steveklabnik
Interesting. I built something like this: <http://crowsne.st/>

These kinds of tools are really valuable. The New York Times called it "One of
the best all-purpose sites with updates from the streets."

