I Want to Annotate My Icy Reality
For the last week I’ve been walking to and from work across a long bridge made difficult by uncleared snow and ice. 
Clearing the bridge is a city government task, but I don’t know how to contact anyone about the problem.
Meanwhile, if I took a picture of the bridge and put it on the Flickr photo sharing site, I could instantly drag the photo onto the bridge’s location on a map and tag it with “snow” or “better under Mayor Williams” or whatever. And, I see now, someone has done exactly that.
My daily trudge suggested an obvious e-government solution based on annotated reality: the city could have an online map that residents could mark with issues, problems, and suggestions. They could drag and drop virtual push pins with, for instance:
- snow / ice
- pothole
- drug dealing
- dead animal
It would then be easy for a city to use thousands of citizen eyes to spot problems and judge their urgency by how many markers were dropped on any particular problem. And it could be linked to mobile systems: a message from a mobile phone could place a pin automatically, with the system itself judging the user's location using GPS or tower location.
Perhaps this is already happening in Helsinki or Singapore--but, for better and worse, I live in Washington DC.
Image courtesy Jeanne Welsh
Josh Calder
in Technology, Information
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