In the lead up to this summer's mass mobilizations surrounding the political conventions, we are pleased to announce the founding of a communications software development project called Tapatio. It is the goal of Tapatio to help provide street-level protesters with timely and accurate information by receiving, vetting, and disseminating important logistical and tactical reports. We believe that this is the next step in protest communications. In the past we have been able to use sms txt messaging to rapidly spread essential data. Through, Tapatio we aim to increase this functionality by also being able to receive data, and then being able to assess the accuracy of information, categorize it, and then send it out to those that it applies to. We hope that this will allow protesters to receive timely information that is specifically relevant to their interests. Please read on to learn more and find out how you can help!
About TapatioTapatio is intended to be a communications resource for the radical anti-authoritarian community. We are attempting to develop a system that can be used in mass direct action scenarios to gather tactical information, categorize that information based on type and urgency, vet the information for reliability, and then dispatch reliable information to individuals in the streets based on the criteria they request (for example, maybe the user only wants information about legal updates, or maybe they want to hear about police mobilizations and medical information). We envision that the information flow will work like this: 1.an individual will submit a report from the streets via txtmessage 2.an operator will receive the report, categorize it based on certain pre-existing tags (for example: food info, downtown, legal support, etc) and give the report an urgency rating. 3.Either the operator will attempt to verify the report by contacting a known scout, or it will be verified by receiving multiple reports. The criteria for verification will need to be worked out by the collective. 4.Verified reports will be dispatched via sms to users that have subscribed to groups that correlate to the tags on the report. Other users will also be given different hooks into the system. Known scouts for example will be given higher authority than unknown reporters. Others groups such as the legal team, the convergence space collective, the food collective, etc. will be given access to a console system to tag and post their own messages. This is an extremely ambitious project, and we hope to have a functional version of it online for the political conventions this summer. However, we also hope to continue development after the conventions to improve the system's functionality, and ease of integration and we also hope to work on protocol that can reduce the reliance on operators and eliminate the hierarchy inherent in the information vetting process.
How You Can Help
Developers
We are very much in need of web developers to help us get a working version of this system online before the conventions. We especially are looking for individuals with experience in php programming, and those with drupal experience. Below you will see a list of functional requirements for the project. We are asking that developers adopt functions to work on. If you are interested in working on one or more function, please contact us at
tapatio[at]hackbloc[dot][org] Others
In an effort to garner support from the radical community as a whole, and to help developers feel appreciated. We are asking that individuals that can't contribute to technical aspects of the project help by offering "ransoms" for aspects of the project. We're thinking of it like the gift economy meets free software. For example, maybe you have a bunch of patches lying around and you canned more peaches last summer than you could possibly eat, and maybe you're really into tapatio having the ability to automatically receive sms messages from individuals in the streets. If this were the case you might consider offering a few cans of peaches and some patches to the developer that completes this feature. If you think you might be willing to offer something in this way, please post a comment under the feature you'd like to see, or if you're not sure what feature to support, but you want to support the project as a whole, please email
tapatio[at]hackbloc[dot][org]
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