Groups of programmers gathered in three cities this weekend to build digital tools for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several of those tools have already launched, and in many cases they’re being maintained by activists who’ve never held a sign in a park.
“I was waiting to see how I should be involved,” says Jake Levitas, who attended the San Francisco hackathon. “In the last week, I thought, ‘I know I’m going to dedicate a lot of time to this movement. I don’t know how, but I know I want to be involved.’”
When he found out about the hackathon through Facebook, he knew how he wanted to participate. Levitas, working with a small team at the event, started a design library called OccupyDesign. It’s a database of Occupy Wall Street protest placards, logistical signs and icons — with a strong focus on infographics. The idea, he says, is that it is harder to argue with facts presented visually than it is a talking point, and that a centralized visual library can help the protests make a strong impression. And he hopes this project will get more designers like him involved.
“Especially if they don’t think they can sleep on the street for a while,” he says, “they don’t know how they can plug in.”
Around the same time Levitas was working on OccupyDesign in San Francisco, Mark Belinsky was working on a decentralized decision-making platform that he calls OccupyVotes on the opposite coast. Belinsky, the president of a non-profit called Digital Democracy, used his time at the New York City hackathon to turn a platform he developed for the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt into a tool for articulating the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“It kind of struck me, of course we can use it here, because the media keeps asking what the protesters want,” he says.
OccupyVotes simply asks users to cast votes for one of two movement goals. For instance, “allow collective bargaining” or “enact mandatory limits/caps on campaign spending” are two options. Users, theoretically Occupy Wall Street activists, choose one idea or “I can’t decide” and are immediately presented with another choice. Every idea stays “above the fold” and anyone is free to add a new idea. The hope is that eventually this approach will sort out what the decentralized group as a whole finds important.
Since Belinsky sent OccupyVotes to Occupy Wall Street listservs, put up a Facebook page and started tweeting about it, the site has collected about 10,000 votes. So far “repeal corporate personhood” and “allow the Bush tax cuts to expire” are the most popular ideas and “another bailout” is the least popular. Soon Belinsky hopes to send volunteers with tablet computers into Zuccotti Park to collect votes from the protesters there.
Other hackathon attendees built a group texting app for on-the-fly coordination, a Q&A site for occupy organizers, a video-editing platform that doubles as an advertising platform, an app that can use multiple cellphones in a small area to amplify one person’s voice and offered suggestions for the Occupied Wall Street Journal‘s website. Their projects are in various stages of launch.
Matt Ewing, the organizer of the San Francisco hackathon, said he solicited ideas from Occupy listservs before the hackathon. Many of those ideas were among the six built by about 40 programmers during the event, but some came from the programmers themselves.
“I think we’ve built some powerful tools that when deployed will help grow the movement,” he says. “It’s a small part of a movement that is constantly getting bigger, but an important part.”
Source : http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/occupy-wall-street-hackathons-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
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