occupy sandy
from their site:
Occupy Sandy is a grassroots disaster relief network that emerged to provide mutual aid to communities affected by Superstorm Sandy. We’re also a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice so all donations are tax deductible
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intro’d to them and adding the page because of Adam Greenfield‘s write up..
a diagram of occupy sandy:
http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/02/a-diagram-of-occupy-sandy/
preliminary notes (linked in back of against the smart city):
http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/preliminary-notes-to-a-diagram-of-occupy-sandy/
..Even this seemingly very basic step had a certain ideological logic to it, though: people working with OS are universally known by their first name or nickname, and there’s something appealingly democratic about it. It’s kind of nice to find, amidst a process like this, that you’re Adam, and not Sergeant Greenfield. You wind up using people’s names a lot, which I belatedly realized that I’d gotten out of the habit of doing.
REGISTRATION desk. The form is straightforward, capturing contact information, availability, and whether the volunteer possesses specialized skills — i.e. medical, legal, construction or demolition experience; fluency in Spanish or Russian.
I believe that it’s entirely appropriate for a movement founded on core tenets of anti-oppression to ask would-be volunteers to understand those tenets, to explain that expressions of sexism, racism, classism or homophobia would not be tolerated, and to emphasize that people unable to let go of such viewpoints would most likely be more comfortable elsewhere. What I found somewhat more striking was the immediate insistence that what is happening at 520 Clinton and the other OS sites is mutual aid, and precisely not charity, followed by a brief discussion of what the difference implies for the longevity of relief efforts and the relations of power inscribed in them. I found this very moving, personally, and while like everyone I couldn’t wait to dive in to the real work, I stood through the orientation spiel with a shit-eating grin.
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dec 2014:
The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology
Occupy Sandy’s volunteers were unquestionably able to do this because they used networked technology to coordinate and maintain real-time situational awareness over their activities. Crucially, though, the systems they used were neither particularly elaborate, nor the ones many theorists of networked urbanism might have envisioned. They certainly didn’t have anything to do with the high-spec, high-margin instrumentation that IT multinationals would have municipal governments invest in.
Ed as well
The true enablers of participation turn out to be nothing more exciting than cheap commodity devices, reliable access to sufficiently high- bandwidth connectivity, and generic cloud services. These implications should be carefully mulled over by developers, those responsible for crafting municipal and national policy, and funding bodies in the philanthropic sector.
In both these cases, ordinary people used technologies of connection to help them steer their own affairs, not merely managing complex domains to a minimal threshold of competence, but outperforming the official bodies formally entrusted with their stewardship. This presents us with the intriguing prospect that more of the circumstances of everyday urban life might be managed this way, on a participatory basis, by autonomous neighbourhood groups networked with one another in something amounting to a city-wide federation.
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be you. 