Interesting Wired article that points to a couple of online mental mapping projects. Mental mapping is yet another technique that originated with Stanley Milgram. In these examples, users are asked to report on how they perceive the boundaries of U.S. urban areas, and a slight variation that addresses the \”pop vs soda\” debate. Pop vs Soda is particularly interesting to me. As a Canadian, the carbonated beverages referred to as Coke or Pepsi can only be called a \”pop,\” but when living in Boston I routinely received puzzled looks unless I clarified that I wanted a \”soda\”. Of course, I later learned that any true Bostonian refers to a soda as a \”tonic\”!
The Missouri Department of Transportation is moving forward with a controversial plan to use cell phone data to monitor traffic congestion. Read article. It is unclear from the article if individual subscribers can opt in or out of the program – but it appears not. I expected the adoption of position-aware phones for this purpose, but had always assumed that it would be a private sector initiative with mobile subscribers reimbursed for their data (i.e. free toll road access). I am a little more surprised that a government agency would risk the \’big brother\’ label and overtly use the technology in this way (I expected a bigger backlash). At least location-aware cell phone data has not yet made its way into the hands of car insurance agencies or my local pizza delivery store, as in this video from the ACLU.
Announcing the release of GovLink, a new service on I-neighbors.org. I-neighbors users can now communicate directly with elected officials through their neighborhood website. Users sign into their account at I-neighbors.org and click on \”GovLink\”. Users are then presented with a list of the federal, state/provincial, and local elected officials for their area (or the best information we could compile). Users click on an official’s name and compose a message. Under the belief that many elected officials ignore or are overwhelmed by emails, we take the message and fax it to the official’s office (for free of course!). Users then have the option of sharing their message with other I-neighbors members. A month later we email users and ask them to report back about the speed and quality of the official’s response – which we will soon aggregate and post on I-neighbors.org. Of course, we are interested in how this technology affects political participation and users receive a short survey about past levels of political activity. For more information, have a look at the GovLink FAQ Here is my plea. While I was able to lock a small group of students into a room for a semester and have them collect a lot of contact information on elected officials, our database is far from complete. We could use all the help we can get adding contact info for local officials across the United States and Canada. We have built a modified Wiki system into I-neighbors.org that allows peopled to enter information and to check the accuracy of information entered by other users. A special thank you to Tom Steinberg and the U.K. based website faxyourmp.com for inspiring GovLink.