I have blogged on the ideas of mobileactive reporting before ranging from the use of phones to catch police abuse in Seattle to students capturing teachers abusing students, to using phones to inspire others to join them at a rally. We need to work out the strategies and technologies whereas the connected world becomes a tool of the masses not merely a wired world monitored by the state and centralized authorities.
Link: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Earth Witness.
I've long admired the Witness project, which provides video cameras to human rights activists around the world in order to document violations and abuses. I was particularly happy to see the recent news that Witness plans to open up a web portal to enable users of digital cameras and cameraphones to send in their recordings over the Internet, rather than just as hand-carried videotape. While thinking about that development, however, it occurred to me that a similar model might work well for a "second superpower" army of networked environmentalists: imagine a web portal collecting recordings and evidence of ecological problems (human-caused or otherwise), environmental crimes, and significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. It would be, in essence, an "Earth Witness" project.
