While waiting for the car

The mighty Scion lost an oxygen sensor today so while waiting for the repair I thought I’d finish Ira Shor’s When Students Have Power. It’s a great review of the implications of democratic education and hegemony couched in a narrative about a community college class Shor taught a few years back.

Later in the day I’m reviewing some material for the school’s web site when I came across a variety of sites trying to move democratic involvement to the web. One site was a branch from a Kurzweil article on The Internet of Things that looked at real-time applications like train status and stations in the UK in light of citizen participation in government.

The item that most caught my eye was an app for reporting road damage and concerns.

View Street Repair Map

The map shows all calls for road repair and concerns along with citizen photos of the problems. Seems so simple, yet so democratic. Some of the concerns have little to do with asphalt (football being played on the highway) but you could see some kind of evaluation of cost and urgency attached to each entry. The remarkable group working on this and other projects is mysociety.org

How might this be adapted to other citizen input needs?