> I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard.
Hey, so they do manage to fulfill their stated aims in your neighborhood. Pretty cool. Looking in my own I still see multiple weeks old "shots fired" that my city determined were kids letting off firecrackers. Judging by other comments on this post the, uh, flexible understanding of truth Citizen has is the default, absent a very active-on-Citizen neighborhood.
> I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done. I don't live in a small town either.
> Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
Why not? If Citizen is working in your community, as you say, then it's already piggy-backing off a considerable amount of free effort that you all do to augment the data it gets for free from your community. What's the point of a for-profit middleman here? I sure can't go to a public meeting and complain to the city council that Citizen is misfiling firecrackers, although I can do that for any misfiled data in my PD/FD's transparency website. And have done.
Government services generally aren't 'viable' in the sense of turning a profit anyway, we just all agree to pay into the kitty to fund stuff we more or less get utility out of. (Ignoring that Citizen itself doesn't seem to be viable.) I'm not really sure what your concern about scaling is, but I will note that governments all over, small and large, manage to provide digital services to their constituencies.
> For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done.
Except by the time it gets to neighbors on a walk it's yesterday's news. What I'm talking about is up-to-the-minute safety for events that have happened in the past 15 minutes. Only online communication and instant phone alerts are fast enough for that.
Hey, so they do manage to fulfill their stated aims in your neighborhood. Pretty cool. Looking in my own I still see multiple weeks old "shots fired" that my city determined were kids letting off firecrackers. Judging by other comments on this post the, uh, flexible understanding of truth Citizen has is the default, absent a very active-on-Citizen neighborhood.
> I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done. I don't live in a small town either.
> Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
Why not? If Citizen is working in your community, as you say, then it's already piggy-backing off a considerable amount of free effort that you all do to augment the data it gets for free from your community. What's the point of a for-profit middleman here? I sure can't go to a public meeting and complain to the city council that Citizen is misfiling firecrackers, although I can do that for any misfiled data in my PD/FD's transparency website. And have done.
Government services generally aren't 'viable' in the sense of turning a profit anyway, we just all agree to pay into the kitty to fund stuff we more or less get utility out of. (Ignoring that Citizen itself doesn't seem to be viable.) I'm not really sure what your concern about scaling is, but I will note that governments all over, small and large, manage to provide digital services to their constituencies.