PUBLIC MARKS with search citizen

Americans seem ready to forfeit their most basic civil liberty -- actually, all their civil liberties -- without a whimper. By a vote of 93-7 the Senate this month approved a military appropriations bill empowering the government to designate any U.S. citizen within the country as a terrorist and to have the military hold him indefinitely without trial and without the right to habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a court for a judgment on the legality of one's imprisonment.

An excellent identity for Consumer Society and Citizen Networks, a Ukrainian organization that protects the rights of consumers.  Designed by Kaffeine Communications, the image combines “…a bar code – as a symbol of consumption – and an umbrella – as a symbol of protection’.

"They were releasing data, it was just not very specific," said Sean Bonner, via Skype Interview. Bonner has served as the communications lead for Safecast since the project began. The Japanese government "would release data for some areas and not for others — or rather they didn't have it," he said. "I don't think they had data they weren't releasing. Our point is that the sensors to detect the data were not in place at all. So we decided to help with that."

designed to take citizen mapping to rural areas with the help of “ICT Buses”.

And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there’s no reason to leave this all up to automation.

vidéo réalisée par le studio WOW (basé au Japon : Tokyo et Sendai et en Italie : Florence) pour Citizen intitulée « Infinity », je suis encore séduit par la nouvelle qui s’appelle, elle, « Circle ».

Intrigué, j’ai voulu en savoir plus en cherchant le site. J’y ai aussi découvert « Lights and shadows ».

WORLDbytes’ crews of young volunteers learning to shoot alternative news programmes are regularly stopped from filming on the streets of London. Yet it is not against the law to film in public spaces, to investigate what the public think and let people have their say on issues of the day. Sick of being stopped, volunteers made a stand against the arbitrary interference suffered by photographers and film makers and achieved a one day victory for citizen journalism. In future they’ll certainly question instructions to ‘move on’ and need your support.

Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen.

The City of Nanaimo is not alone in recognising this global need. The US Federal Government has recently committed to embrace OpenID to allow simple access to citizen resources (http://openid.net/government/). As of November 2008, there were over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 27,000 sites had integrated the OpenID standard*. (* see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID)

It starts by including citizen to elicit and describe the local dynamics and needs to feed the data analysis process of their city. They can create their own point of view with the ability to observe and capture their environment. This potential to capture, observe and replay the city echoes very well with the recent interest of some architects, urban planners and designers in unconventional data sources (e.g. beyond traditional surveys). But how does it integrate into the current practice? Is there a spot for some vernacularism? How can urban scouts and urban safaris communicate with practitioners and decision makers?

Michael Goodchild’s notion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the emergence of geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals, to discuss the greater presence of unvoluntarily generated geographic data. In the talk “Not So Volunteered Geographic Information“, I present my method to analysis these new kinds of citizen generated data, and use my work to discuss the induced opportunities, limitations and concerns.