London's protesters have a new tool to add to their arsenal, which is designed to help them avoid being trapped by the authorities. It's called Sukey.
Sukey works by utilising the power of the crowd to automate the process of avoiding roadblocks. It comprises of a suite of applications that allow protesters to both submit and access information about which road junctions are clear and which are blocked by the authorities.
There are two ways to access the data. Newer phones with GPS and a modern web browser can use "Roar", which offers a compass-like view, centred around your location. Different coloured bars point towards different road junctions, with the colour indicating whether it's passable -- green exits are clear, yellow ones are difficult and red ones are blocked. There's an interactive demonstration (no pun intended) here.
If you have an older phone, you can access "Growl", which employs SMS to transmit information. To subscribe, send "follow" to 86444, and to cancel the alerts send "stop". Each of those costs 10p, but any messages you get are free. The message feed can be seen on Twitter at @sukeysms, so if you prefer, you can subscribe to that.
The information provided is crowdsourced from submissions from people on the ground, reports on Twitter, and footage from TV news. You can tweet using the #sukey hashtag, or at the @sukeydata account, or you can submit location data through Google Latitude, by SMS, or even by geotagging photos on Flickr or Twitpic. In the "Roar" app, you can click a coloured segment of the wheel to report its information as incorrect, and submit more accurate info instead.
The app's been carefully designed such that any identifiable information isn't stored or processed, and it also employs heavy encryption to make sure that request data can't be accessed. The creators claim that DDOS protection has been built in, too.
For the moment, it only works in London, but the team behind it plans to release versions in the future that work nationally, and even internationally. They also want to release the source code so other activist groups around the world can build their own version.
Finally, if the worst happens and you end up stuck in a kettle for the evening, then a Twitter account called @sukeydating has sprung up so that you can potentially find activist-love. A sample message? "You know why they're called kettles? Because they're hot and steamy..."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK