What’s the safest speed to travel on a freeway? If you guessed the speed limit, you’re probably wrong! There is pretty strong evidence to suggest that the safest speed to travel is the speed the other cars are traveling. ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/06/texas_85_mile_per_hour_speed_limit_do_higher_speed_limits_cause_more_accidents_.html )
However, the cheapest speed to travel is definitely at or below the speed limit, because of aggressive police speed ticketing. For instance, Hampton, Florida (and a couple other small towns) had formed a notoriously corrupt police force where there was a department so large there was a police officer for every 25 residents. This police force performed one task, ticketing people speeding on the highway passing through, neglecting to keep drugs out of the community or perform other tasks. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida-corruption/). Although the town faced many other oddities and corruptions that make it a less than stellar example, traffic & parking tickets have a bad reputation of existing solely to fund police departments, especially when civil asset seizure is also considered (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/10/11/cash-seizures-fuel-police-spending/) (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/02/kaley_v_united_states_terrible_supreme_court_decision_lets_the_government.html).
Enter Waze, collaborative community based traffic mapping system which addresses the lack of oversight of police. Waze allows users to let other users know where police are monitoring, so that drivers can be alert and not get caught ‘driving unsafely’. Not so subtly, the following image appears on Waze’s website:
Naturally, this isn’t too popular with police. It’s curious to see what arguments & strategies are used:
LAPD Police Chief argued that Waze endangers officers by letting would-be criminals track their locations. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102373083# . However, many critique law enforcement for defending an important source of revenue https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150126/08232429821/law-enforcement-wants-google-to-cripple-waze-because-it-lets-mean-old-public-stalk-police-officers.shtml. At Waze, however, the argument tends that knowing a police officer is around increases road safety as people are more likely to drive safely http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/08/opinion/navarrette-waze-speed-traps/ .
With this context, let’s discuss how Waze is and isn’t a networked public sphere.
Firstly, Waze is a community which does produce a shared common good. This is commons based production, but due to the central authority over the information, I think it fails to fully meet Benkler’s peer standard. However, much of the economics of peer production still applies. There are not only different types of users who will either use, not use, or use & add to the data but also car pooling groups, which may use Waze differently (perhaps shotgun resumes its role in defending from bandits).
This is a network which greatly helps individual liberty by helping users to avoid police interference. Although in its nascence, technology like Waze can be deployed to monitor police in other situations. For instance, Sukey was used and built to help UCL protestors avoid police kettling (a controversial crowd control tactic). In this case, the technology fits more into Benkler’s views on internet communities — Sukey facilitates a meatspace interaction, but leans heavily on the virtual space to ensure the freedoms of such groups.
In the Waze network, data is of utmost import. The data created, however, is centralized on Google servers. This means that it will serve google purposes, ie, knowing that people slow down near police markers Waze may choose to show police markers near google billboards, or play other tricks, such as inaccurately reporting police presence at the request of a local department.
Overall, I don’t think that Waze is an idealized Networked Public Sphere, but I do think that it serves an important role: it get’s people collaborating to solve a problem, and using internet technology to perform the collaboration. If Sukey is any guide it is that when specific, more serious, issues arise turning to a collaborative model will be natural, and we have the design techniques & software to be able to roll such a system out quickly and in an ad-hoc manner.