Sukey - A tool for non-violent demonstrations | Hacker News Reader

Sukey - A tool for non-violent demonstrations

sukey.org

18 pointskilian8 comments

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...

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...

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?

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?

>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 :)

Who watches the watchers?

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...

"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/

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com