“State and Space” is an project created by the team at OccupyDataNYC.org that attempts to surface and address police abuse, particularly surrounding the Occupy movement. Quoting an early description by the team, State and Space attempts to “examine the frequency and nature of incidents related to interactions between the NYPD and the Occupy movement, including the use of tactics intended to harm peaceful protesters, identity-based discrimination, other abuses of power and benevolence.” [1]
30,000+ tweets were initially used to create the application, analysis, and visualization that are the outputs of the project. This hints at some of the architecture that this project leverages to enable a semi-collaborative outcome that holds police accountable for misconduct. By relying on Twitter, a platform heavily used by the Occupy movement, the project gains an existing platform for the publication and data collection of an already active digital public sphere. By using text analysis and word occurrence counting, they find patterns in the already existing outcries and reports documenting misconduct. It leverages the IBM visualization platform ManyEyes to display the data in a visually compelling way. While State and Space is clearly well-intentioned, and here are a series of questions around the inclusiveness and effectiveness
How Inclusive Is It?
Twitter is the required form of submission for this system. It admittedly is a bit of a stretch to call this project collaborative (see “Interactive” below) however the project is made up of the contributions of many people, all aiming to reveal the same types of abuse. It is important to consider who has this agency. Certainly there are many people without access or knowledge of how to interact with Twitter, or even the understanding that using this platform to report abuse might result in any kind of response or impact. In addition, this is a closed system. One is required to sign up for an account with a specific entity. The potential for minority groups or disenfranchised populations to be targeted by police, especially in the city, is unfortunately high. It is important to consider who can collaborate and participate when one designs a system that should represent anyone and everyone in society.
How Interactive is it?
Many tools in the space of government innovation and intervention are non-interactive. (For examples, refer to almost every Sunlight Foundation project.) They grease the rails and reduce barriers to existing data stores, sometimes in extremely innovative ways. These projects are extremely valuable, but the focus is on access, and not contribution or collaboration. In State and Space, the data was initially scraped from a platform at a point in time (presumably with the plan to continue scraping at intervals) but this has a limited interactivity. Setting aside for the moment concerns about the abuse of contribution to a system like this once known, where controls and metrics for preventing and flagging are absent, the ability to contribute to and collaborate with this system is truncated. It is understandable that the project was build with limited resources and time, but this calls out requirements for extra-government solutions that need to be accounted for. If the system design is such that users can only contribute from the outside, and have no agency once the data is ingested from another platform, users are effectively cut off from a continuing dialog around the issue.
How Sustainable and Persistent Is It?
Platforms come and go. Applications built on these platforms go with them. One of the first things you notice upon visiting State and Space is that it’s missing. The interactive visualizations were hosted on IBM’s service and as far as one can tell, they are lost to code or platform rot. This raises some significant questions about what is required of technology that is deployed to patch holes in government. While they may take a very long time to build, and are the brunt of many jokes, the degree to which governmental systems are designed and tested for scale and hosted on platforms that are build for longevity is significant. Far from an argument against these kinds of innovations, experiments, and interventions, this is simply a reality check for many platforms that aim to be a real and lasting fix to governmental ills. If the goal is for a platform to make it beyond the weekend hackathon or the spare time afforded by the developer, serious thought and effort needs to be put into who will keep it running and how, and what provisions are made for archiving or persisting the discourse or content that takes place on it.
A Note on Benevolence:
As it appears, the inclusion of “benevolence” in the list of goals for this project seems like an afterthought. It may well have been, but it is an important inclusion nonetheless. Building collaborative technologies requires thought about who the audience and intended user base is. Who is going to be collaborating? One can imagine ways in which the police themselves might participate in this conversation and contribute valuable perspectives. If they are cut out of this opportunity, or if they are made to feel that the collaborative space is one that is inherently against them, some of the potential for efficacy and positive benefit is lost. This may be more of a philosophical question when dealing with abuse of power and authority in government, but the thought the designers had that they might highlight actions that deserve merit is a powerful conceptual addition to the model.
1. “State and Space – Day 1”. http://occupydatanyc.org/2012/09/29/state-and-space-day-1/.