I managed to convince my advisor that my traveling to Israel and Palestine was essential to my research, and so I’m off for five weeks. I’ll be conducting interviews with human rights groups, activists and ordinary citizens about what kinds of digital tools they might find useful under the Occupation.
What exactly I should build is still an open question. I’m designing a platform that combines data on the checkpoints, the wall, the road networks, and other arbitrary instruments of control imposed on the population. I want to enable citizens to contribute their local knowledge to the map to keep it dynamically updated. A text message interface for this would probably be the most widely useful. I have a very rough start to this called Ground Truth that uses road data from OpenStreetMap.
Weighed down with electronic gear, I hope I don’t get too harshly interrogated in Tel Aviv. I’ll be updating this site with some regularity as events unfold, although certainly not every day. If you’re terribly interested in my daily status, check my Twitter feed, which I’ll update from a cell phone so everyone knows I’m still alive.