For technical reasons*, our groundcrew blog is now accessible at a new url:

http://groundcrew.us/blog

update your bookmarks and rss feeds! Look forward to lots of excitement–things are heating up.

* we’ve switched from wordpress to jekyll.

for immediate release

GROUNDCREW VIEWER NOW OPEN SOURCE
Citizen Logistics has released the source for their Viewer, the world’s first realtime human coordination interface, under an Affero GPL license.

The text messaging capability of cell phones will deeply change the structure of our economy, and our level of civic engagement, according to Joe Edelman, CEO of Northampton-based Citizen Logistics. “We are leading an open-source effort to make realtime human coordination a possibility,” he said, referring to software which tracks the availability of workers, participants, and volunteers in real-time and lets strangers give each other assignments.

This software project is now looking for co-developers from art projects, universities, companies, and corporations interested in realtime human coordination. Interested developers can clone the git repository at http://github.com/jxe/groundcrew-viewer, can view a live installation of the software at http://groundcrew.us, and can contact joe@citizenlogistics.com to get access to the pivotal tracker and other peices of project infrastructure.

The project will also be having weekly “codejams” on Monday afternoons, Eastern Daylight Time, starting this Monday. Join us on irc.freenode.new/#groundcrew.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Behold!

A revised interface for the Groundcrew Viewer, in preparation for the upcoming Northampton launch.  Check it out and put feedback in the comments!

Over the next few days I’ll be adding back in some missing features and some new wizardry around making wishes come true and summoning large squads.

We have been accepted by AOL/AIM as an officially supported “commercial” AIM Bot. This makes it possible for us to address thousands or tens of thousands simultaneously over AIM and SMS, making much larger coordination efforts possible. We will likely collaborate with Twitter on some software for interfacing with AIM.

Many thanks to Greg and Blaine, who helped me track down the right people at AOL to help make this happen, and of course to everyone responsible for Open AIM and the AIM/SMS bridge.

We’ve incorporated Citizen Logistics as a “Common Good Corporation”. What does that mean? Well, at some point we want to expand rapidly. That means taking investment. But we don’t want to let that compromise our values!

When we do take investment, there will be a cap on the ROI investors can expect or demand, and rather than offer an exit through acquisition or IPO, we offer a buyback scheme. So long as we offer at least that level of return and can commit to buying back our stock, our primary covenant is to use profits “in accord with the common good” — in our case, to devote resources to activating local communities in volunteering and fun, even if that’s not the most lucrative deployment opportunity.

We will also have a related 501(c)3 organization where folks can send donations that will go straight to community work. This is a kind of hybrid for/non-profit structure, similar to google’s “.org”. It means we can take investment when we start to grow, but that our investors and staff will be maximizing more than the traditional “bottom line”.

For Citizen Logistics, positive experience and global conviviality ARE the bottom line.

Groundcrew was used recently as part of a theatrical performance, so as to incite the audience to participate. It most certainly worked– hundreds of assignments went into the audience, and many real-time reports came back as audience members texted about what was going on all around them. photos

We also did a fun public space activity on Febuary 12th. photos