By Team Sukey
Team Sukey want to send their congratulations to the demonstrators in London today and to the police for turning today’s march against the education cuts into a peaceful event for all involved.
This time, police in London did not have to resort to the controversial technique of pre-emptive kettling of peaceful protesters, a tactic widely criticised for increasing the chances of trouble and as an assault on the democratic right to protest.
We would like to thank everyone who took part in our historic experiment. By crowd-sourcing information using our new mobile phone application and website or via free SMS messages, sukey.org were able to help people work together to make this a safe and good-natured demonstration.
Acting as a newsroom, the team were able to take your anonymised reports from the ground sent in via social media, filter out misinformation, and send it back to you on the streets to keep you moving and keep you safe.
Messages from the police were also passed back to the ground. This allowed them to reassure protesters who decided to splinter off from the original destination and show solidarity with the people of Egypt outside the Egyptian embassy that they were happy with the behaviour of the crowd and had no intention to kettle people.
By increasing transparency we hope we have increased safety and accountability.
Tonight, after a week of very little sleep, the tech team will be getting some well deserved rest. This has been a very successful first trial of the application and we have ideas for dozens of ways in which to make it even more useful and robust.
London is just the beginning.
(As of today, I have taken on the role of press contact for Sukey. This post is a press release for immediate release and will also be made available on the main site, sukey.org.)
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