Open Source Homeland

England is a great hotbed of community-oriented action sites that rely on data to make them go. Here’s Fixmystreet:

What is FixMyStreet for?

FixMyStreet is a site to help people report, view, or discuss local problems they’ve found to their local council by simply locating them on a map. It launched in beta early February 2007.

Can you give me some examples?

Sure. Graffiti, unlit lampposts, abandoned beds, broken glass on a cycle path; anything like that that could be usefully reported to your council to be fixed.

How do I use the site?

After entering a postcode or location, you are presented with a map of that area. You can view problems already reported in that area, or report ones of your own simply by clicking on the map at the location of the problem.

How are the problems solved?

They are reported to the relevant council by email. The council can then resolve the problem the way they normally would. Alternatively, you can discuss the problem on the website with others, and then together lobby the council to fix it, or fix it directly yourselves.

Is it free?

The site is free to use, yes. FixMyStreet is run by a registered charity, though, so if you want to make a contribution, please do.

Built by great people who are pushing the limits in what it means to be involved w/o being a whiner:

built by mySociety, in conjunction with the Young Foundation. mySociety is the project of a registered charity which has grown out of the community of volunteers who built sites like TheyWorkForYou.com. mySociety’s primary mission is to build Internet projects which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. Our first project was WriteToThem, where you can write to any of your elected representatives, for free.

Abandoned bicycles – Viewing a problem – FixMyStreet
Reported in the Abandoned Vehicles category by Tom Coady at 16:43, Wednesday

 Here’s a handy tool you’d might like to have around on the Day After:

VentureBeat » Trulite to release handy fuel cell for consumers
Trulite, a Houston, Texas company, has developed a portable fuel cell for the consumer, contained in a box that powers everything from computer, to fridges and construction site power tools.

Costing around $2,000 initially, the environmentally friendly hydrogen fueled device measures a trim 7 inches wide, 18 inches tall, and 18 inches deep.

It is much cleaner than alternatives, producing water and heat as its only byproducts. It will hit the market during the second quarter of next year. It will be one of the first consumer fuel cells on the market. It is designed to replace regular gas generators people have used until now, which are noisy and polluting.

As we saw in London, where a car bomb was discovered and dismantled prior to explosion when paramedics kept their eyes open and a policeman did the right thing at the right time, vigilance and attentiveness can make all the difference.

6 Years After 9/11, the Same Threat – New York Times
The new estimate does cite some gains; known plots against the United States have been disrupted, it says, thanks to increased vigilance and countermeasures.

But the new estimate takes note of sources of worry that have arisen only since 2001. The Iraq war has spawned Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as the “most visible and capable affiliate” of the original terrorist group, inspiring jihadists around the world and drawing money and recruits to their cause. The explosion of radical Internet sites has created self-generating cells of would-be terrorists in many Western countries. Lebanese Hezbollah, rarely considered likely to attack in the United States, now “may be more likely to consider” doing just that in response to a perceived threat from American forces to itself or its sponsor, Iran.

Here’s a PDF version of the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, July 20, 2007.

 Chicago received cash today to help solve the problem identified in recent interoperability reports. Got to get less turf war between county and city.

City to get $16M for police, fire communications upgrades | Crains
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the money will answer “the urgent need for firefighters, police, and other first responders to be able to communicate effectively with one another.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the money should get the entire country up to a basic standard of effective emergency communication by 2009 — but only if the local authorities coordinate with each other and avoid turf fights.

Here’s a fantastic use of human computer labor:

What is reCAPTCHA?
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” OCR. The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Example of OCR errors

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.