How It Happened
Last night a group of us got together to discuss ChangeCamp London and different opportunities for fostering a more collaborative & open culture in London. It was a great meeting and we’ll see some good things coming together in the near future.
With that still fresh in my mind, I noticed a tweet from Jody Bailey:
My bike was stolen today from outside the downtown library http://bit.ly/a8OjBg http://bit.ly/chSPvo contact me if you see her #ldnont
[Update: more at FMBS.]
I felt pretty bad — he spent the last month biking and tweeting about #30daysofbiking — so I retweeted it without hesitation, thinking, “you never know… as it ripples out through people’s social circles maybe it’ll be seen by someone who knows something.”
He thanked me, adding,
After talking with security and police, apparently bike parking downtown is a real problem. Time for some action.
So naturally, my response was,
Let’s start a website!
Of course, that’s my response to every problem, but I think in this case it’s a pretty good fit for pulling something together: challenging but doable, with room for imagination and opportunities for people with different skills and knowledge to contribute.
We won’t “solve” the bike theft problem any time soon, but at the very least we can build some awareness about this issue and stretch our underused collaborative muscles, giving us valuable practice and experience for other initiatives in the future.
Where To Begin
I did a very shallow search for existing initiatives and found one: the Boston Stolen Bikes Community Alert. It is (or maybe was) run through the City of Boston’s website, using Twitter and Facebook to take in reports of stolen bikes and then distribute alerts out to police, bike shops, hospital & school security, and anyone following those feeds.
But Twitter and Facebook don’t strike me as the best approach.
The first thing I thought of was that maybe we could track locations & times, and then turn the data into visualizations — maybe patterns will emerge, leading to arrests or more effective strategies for prevention.
Maybe a visualization can increase awareness enough to motivate more people to put a little extra thought and effort into the problem — to be on the lookout for thieves, etc. You never know who might see it and generate a serendipitous lead or insight.
And considering what’s possible with real-time mobile apps, it’s hypothetically conceivable that someone could report a theft-in-progress, sending out an alert to people within a certain distance to see where the thief might have gone.
And why does it have to stop with bike thefts?
Even if no bikes are recovered, there’s a kind of therapeutic value for overcoming that helpless feeling — to feel like they did something — and to actually see the information is out for people to notice, where it might do some good.
What Do We Need?
Obviously we need people with technical know-how. I have next to none. Maybe we can start with something as simple as a Google map [which I just spent 1 minute setting up] that people can push pins into.
Ideally the police would be involved. Note that in Boston’s case the police where already tweeting when the bike program launched. If anyone has any insight into, or relationships with anyone the police department, maybe we can explore something there.
And of course, first and last, we need an active community — i.e. people in the cycling community to champion this — who want to see it work and are willing to experiment a little and keep up the momentum » Spread the word!
Also, a catchy name never hurts…
What do you think?
And if you see Jody’s bike, contact him @3oh6.
Update: add your bike or improve on this (which wouldn’t be hard).
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