Months after the first protesters arrived in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street continues to fuel tech innovation. Several weeks ago, #OWS sympathizers created a “People’s Skype”; meanwhile, a hackathon held this weekend uncovered previously unknown parallels with the Arab Spring. These developments are just the latest in a string of new products and tools that have come out of the movement.
J.R. Baldwin, a graduate student working on a MFA in Design and Technology at New York’s Parsons The New School for Design, created an open-source product called the People’s Skype. Baldwin calls the People’s Skype a “phone-powered, distributed voice and voting system for the #Occupy movement,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The open-source software creates an impromptu conference call and televoting system for mobiles and landlines intentionally designed for use in mic checks at #Occupy gatherings. In addition, the program is also intended for use in communicating across police lines and keeping abreast of demonstration news while stuck in a kettled area.
People’s Skype users dial into a local phone number with a New York area code. Users who use the system for an amplified mic check are given a unique PIN. Once connected, they are plugged into a one-way conference call designed to repeat whatever’s being spoken over the #Occupy mic check at that time. When General Assembly items are bought up to vote, the teleconference system is able to record and tally votes submitted via phone keypad.
The software was designed for a class on social change through technology taught by MIT Media Lab’s Chris Csikzentmihalyi and for a class on free speech rights taught by Melanie Crean. People’s Skype was programmed in PHP with a MongoDB database and a Tropo API for phone interaction; Tropo provided assistance with setting up the project. According to Baldwin, “The tricky part came when integrating the dial tone, keypad voting interface, as I had to create a method to be kicked off and instantly rejoined after a key was pressed.”
Speaking of the MIT Media Lab, the high-tech institution held a #Occupydata Hackathon organized by R-Shief. R-Shief is a nonprofit lab that collects and analyzes Middle East-related data from the Internet; the Los Angeles-based organization has already data-mined more than 12 million Twitter messages and several pentabytes of data scraped from publicly accessible social networking sites. Laila Shereen Sakr, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, has played a crucial role in the lab’s efforts and has demonstrated her findings to, among others, executives at Facebook.
