Eyes and Ears of India (Or any country for that matter)
Quick Note for the Impatient: I propose a web-application to coordinate and schedule "a vigil for suspicious activities" by ordinary citizens across the country / world.
Detailed Explanation: It was heart-breaking to see what happened in Mumbai. Although it is easy to blame the "system" for lack of "intelligence", it is simply not possible to believe that none of the citizens who were around the area where terrorists docked did not see them coming. Most probably someone who saw, did not think it was important enough to escalate to the police. ("Chalta Hai" attitude).
Such incidents can be reduced, if ordinary citizens keep their eyes and ears open when they are out in public places doing their regular things and escalate them when something suspicious is seen.
What I propose is a web-application to organize and schedule a vigil whereby volunteers can opt-in to keep their "eyes and ears open" at a particular public place for a particular time-slot.
Other volunteers can see what places and time-slots are already covered and opt to vigil some other area / time-slot.
BTW not sure if this post is relevant in this forum. Sincere apologies if that is the case.
What do fellow hackers think about this idea? Indian here. Mumbaikar here. Bad idea.... Very bad idea... You simply can't manage signal to noise in such an effort and the cost of false-positives is zero to you and very very high to the poor false-positive. I had thought about the very high noise level. My argument is at a given place / time, if atleast one guy is "good" (obviously the immediate question arises is "which one"), it would be sufficient to escalate a "real situation" and supress a false positive. Maybe this still is a bad idea. My point is we need to figure out how do we harness "intelligence" of ordinary "good" citizens who are on the streets at the time when things are happening or about to happen. Are ordinary "good" citizens capable of really providing such "intelligence" without doing much damage for things about to happen? I doubt it. However, I really appreciate the sheer lack of original journalism that came from ordinary citizens during this time... I think only one or two people were reporting from ground zero... Pretty much everyone else was just echoing the main media. That is a problem that needs a solution... A serious collective of amateur journalists doing some serious journalism and not just echoing the established media would be a great thing to have. No idea, how that could be achieved but if it existed during this mayhem, it would have been the resource I would be glued to, not the maddening sensationalist sickening reporting of the news channels. Who watches the watchmen?