Groundcrew Blog

Your new mission control on iPhone

Today we’re launching v1 of our iPhone app. Go get it and try it out.

For those new to Groundcrew, it lets you start things. We call them missions: Start things in your neighborhood, ask questions of the people who live near you, run events, gather photos and reports, etc. In each case, Groundcrew finds people near you who have joined the same squad and are ready for action, and makes it happen. To start, we’re launching with four local squads that anyone can use:

Pick-Up Games - play sports and other games with people near you.
Neighborhood assistance - for trading favors in your own ‘hood.
Answering local questions - be an ambassador to your neighborhood, or get help when you’re in a new one.
Random Fun - other fun things you can try.

This is our first public version, so there may not be many people near you when you first download it, but invite some friends, your frisbee league, your church, and soon you’ll see enough “agents available” to start the things you want in your life and your neighborhood. We hope Groundcrew for iPhone becomes your new mission control.

You can read more about the web version of Groundcrew at our main site. If you’re organizing events or actions that involve mobile messaging, we wrote it for you. And of course, if you’d like to start your own squad, or have feedback about the app, drop us a note. Get in touch at info@citizenlogistics.com.

These are slides from PdF 2010. It’s about how to make a product that makes a difference.

Groundcrew: Organizing the Social Web on the Terra Firma

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Why Our Bright Green Futures Will Be Weirder Than We Think

I want everyone to read this. Electric cars and local food production are distractions. The path to sustainability is a new world totally unlike our current civilization: a total re-imagination of work, leisure, and sustenance. We can do it, and Groundcrew is a key piece of infrastructure.

Is it possible to live a life without money? | Environment | The Guardian

The best description of the dumpster diving / squatting lifestyle we have read. And a powerful argument for creating a reputation system that motivates owners to leverage excess capacity for the public good.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Here’s the audio from a talk I gave at the Ethos Roundtable last week, covering both the big picture and the immediate usefulness of what we have.

I started out by asking the audience for examples of how their nonprofits connected people in communities, and then, working from their answers, talked about the community metrics we will track and reward:

Number of stranger-to-stranger real life connections
Number of positive experiences caused within these connections
Community assets made available to a larger circle
People who’s ongoing lives have access to more resources
Lasting trust created within a community

I explained how we can encourage community members to share resources with the organizations who do well on these metrics, and how simple that sharing can be using twitter and facebook, etc.

Finally, I got to the ground floor of demoing our availability and communications platform and how it can be used to make all this concrete and for both developers and community organizers to embrace.

Okay, this is way better than the DARPA thing. How many whales can we save with Groundcrew? I love it.

DARPA Network Challenge

Several people have mentioned that our real-time, location-based coordination service, Groundcrew, could be helpful in finding the DARPA Network Challenge balloons.

Groundcrew integrates with facebook, twitter, and SMS, and could be used to:

coordinate taking Aerial or roadside photos
coordinate verification squads on the ground
gather analyses and ideas about possible locations
plant fake balloons

Call us and we can work out how to set it all up.

My bet: with the right location-based messaging technology, and massive adoption, people like Jane McGonigal and Annette Mees can make even our walmart parking lot catastrophies interesting. It’s coming.

MadV does it again. I doubt that any large-scale transformation of civil society can work unless it is beautiful and maybe also funny. Folks like MadV, Ze Frank, and Charlie Todd understand this. And we very much hope that as Citizen Logistics grows, we can get allies like those three to help make our movement as beautiful and as valuable.