The thinking behind the Google Map service is the way every allied organizer should be thinking. Once you are not stuck at the ground level, we need strategists to step back and look at the 30,000 how can we make this happen.
The basic concept behind the way they build information on the map is exactly the way distributed advocacy and social change movements MUST be organizing.
How do movements build up the capacity to enable collaboration with “almost zero effort” on the part of the organizers and groups? What transactions of everyone else in the movement you work in would be most relevant to your work? What are the traffic jams of social change?
The people with cell phone are collaborating. They benefit from the collaboration. They have accepted the bargain of giving back peeks into data about them in order to see the big picture.
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part -- just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car -- and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.
Google Watch - Google Maps - Google Maps Now Shows Live Traffic Reports for Back Roads
