In an earlier blog post, I talked about the problem of police oversight and proposed a new technology to help solve it. I argued that the fundamental problem was one of incentive: police have very little incentive to document their own wrongdoing. The idea behind my proposed technology was to empower the people, who do have an incentive to document police wrongdoing. Now on the topic of collaborative technology that seeks to improve government, I am reminded of why I thought it would be such a good idea.

Just to review, I proposed a mobile app called “CopWatch” that citizens could use to document and evaluate their interactions with the police. GPS data would also be recorded so that the interactions could be mapped. Pictures or video could be attached to a report.

CopWatch falls beautifully into Benkler’s theory of the networked public sphere. As a mobile app, it is inherently designed to take advantage of the proliferation of creative capital inherent in the spread of mobile smartphones. The resulting maps would not be the work of a single individual, but the result of thousands of individual people creating content without direct compensation because of a common goal.

It was designed around the idea that data is valuable, especially public data. The argument CopWatch implicitly presents is that communities can use large amounts of user-generated data to achieve the kind of oversight that government consistently fails to accomplish. This data would not only be made publically available, but also mapped (literally) in a way designed to be meaningful to the average person rather than a statistician. This data would empower citizens to create even more information about underlying trends in policing, thus supporting the secondary generation of content as well.

It is also designed around the value of increased autonomy, which Benkler also presents as an important tenant of the networked public sphere. Without this technology, people have very few tools available to them for sharing information about their police encounters with the community. Social media may represent an easily accessible avenue, but anything posted there will likely be buried in a sea of new content within minutes. Fairly privileged citizens with easy access to legal help may have more direct mechanisms available for dealing with police encounters, but traditionally, disadvantaged citizens have had no way to do the same. CopWatch would enhance their autonomy by allowing them to individually decide to address the problem of negligent policing.

But a slight expansion of my original idea would make CopWatch an even more valuable addition to the networked public sphere.

First, a bot could trawl the #copwatch tag on Twitter and Facebook for report information spread through these means. This would make the service even more open by allowing people without the app or even without smartphones to participate, increasing the amount of data and proving those people with the same expanded autonomy.

Second, the CopWatch website could also host a discussion board about policing generally. This would empower individuals to collaboratively analyze the data to draw more meaningful conclusions. This would also turn users into curators, potentially increasing the value of the content.

As expanded, I think CopWatch would be a powerful force in the networked public sphere by creating both primary and secondary content and empowering citizens to make a difference—aspiring app developers take note.