Hactivism Intent- MarcD
What is your concept/idea? Create a community app that town members who are affected by increased traffic due to GPS cut-through routes can use to communicate about the increased traffic. People in the town will use the app to report a lot of traffic on their road and then a scrambler/GPS deactivator device will be turned on from a cell tower or a telephone pole on that street.
Why is this important and for whom? This is important for people who live in towns near highways that have a lot of cut-through traffic because GPS sends people the fastest ways, which is sometimes to get off the highway. This happens a lot during rush hour which can be dangerous for small children walking to school. It is not fair for the people who live in the towns to get all this increased traffic because of rush hour, car accidents, or tourists driving on the highways and using their GPS’s for the fastest routes.
What New Media/hactivism strategies will you use and why? This will use people-to-people New Media because the traffic will be reported via an app by people in the community observing an increase in traffic on small town roads. The people in the town will be participating in helping to stop an increase of traffic due to the increased use of GPS’s for people who want the fastest routes.
Who is the audience and how do you hope it will influence them? The audience is people who live in these towns. Maps will still be activated on traveler’s phones, however cut-through routes on GPS’s will temporarily be deactivated when there is a report of heavy traffic on small town roads that are near highways.
Rough budget for material, time, space needed to build; this can be a bullet list: Money will be needed for people to write the computer codes for the community app. Also money will be needed to build and install the GPS scrambler/deactivator on the cell tower or telephone poles on small town main roads.
List materials with cost: The app costs and the scrambler/GPS deactivator costs to build, install, and maintain it could be added to a town’s tax budget if the town is interested and has a problem with people cutting through because of highway accidents, rush hour traffic, or tourist traffic on the highway.
List time to actually make/create project: It would probably take a few months to design and build the community app and a few months to design and build the scrambler/GPS deactivator
List tools, software, hardware, space or anything else needed: Software for the app, engineers to develop and build a prototype of the GPS scrambler/deactivator, telephone pole space on already existing telephone poles or cell towers to put the deactivator on
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You’ve probably seen the Way app https://www.waze.com But that ap is more eboradly for community reported traffic data, not specifically for making neighborhood streets safe from re-routed traffic. SO maybe it could be a “safety pig-in” for Waze? Or maybe it’s a separate app geared for community safety.
It might help to get more info about Waze and see how it works–and try it if you can.
You have clearly identified a real need, and a potentially useful APP.
Can you now design how the interface would look, how it would be used, and it’s specific functions? That would make for a stronger Approach. Will this project use any other NMD strategies besides crowdsourcing?