iWitness Described

This is about iWitness as described by its creator, David Russell.

A bit of background. iWitness is a standalone Java (MIDP v2.0) application for your mobile phone. This application is available for download from the “Download” page from my website, http://witness.vibrantplanet.com. As with all mobile Java applications the download is simply a JAR/JAD pair of files.

To use the application there is no registration, no configuration. Once installed on your phone it is ready to go.

The user experience attempts to closely parallel that of a visit to an art gallery where a collection of photo exhibits are on display. The user is in fact presented with a number of photo galleries, each gallery reflecting a distinct “view” of the world. The user can browse between photo exhibits in the gallery. Typically the gallery has multiple floors so they can also move up and down between floors of the gallery. For each photo exhibit a number of options are made available to the user such as viewing the news headlines (currently not the full story) for that image, a “fresh perspective”, publish to the iWitness Community with commentary etc.

The Galleries:

  • The “Now Gallery” displays a collection of Photos that reflect the very latest top stories being promoted by the mainstream global news media.
  • The “History Gallery” displays a collection of Photos that reflect top news stories from the past. You can visit this gallery and observe the world on any day since January 1st, 2005.
  • The “Community Gallery” displays a collection of the latest Photos drawn from the iWitness Community.
  • “My Gallery” is your own personal Photo Album. You can save any Photos that you view or create within iWitness to this photo album and from here you can also publish these photos along with your own commentary to the iWitness Mobile Community Journal.
  • The remaining key feature is called “Eye Witness”, this permits the user to capture snapshot of their world using their phone camera. These images can be added to their personal photo album, “My Gallery” and from there can also be shared with the iWitness Community.

The “backend” is in fact the ‘clever’ knitting together of a number of publicly accessible information resources on the Internet. There is no dedicated server side component for iWitness. World news images and headlines are drawn from tenbyten.org, an interactive exploration of words and pictures that define the time. Each “Fresh Perspective” is a set of images drawn from the flickr.com photo sharing community. The iWitness Community, which reflects the news and views (photos and commentary) published directly by the iWitness user community become immediately available to all mobile phone users by adopting a client-side pull-model from a dedicated flickr account thus avoiding the limitations of a peer-to-peer model such as MMS of message distribution.

Reading your review I’d like to make these observations. As it is not possible for the demo to demonstrate the “Eye Witness” feature the overall experience lacks the “full circle” effect that iWitness attempts to deliver, passively observe *and* actively contribute. It explains as much as is physically possible given I’m emulating a phone camera on a desktop computer. It is provided to give a feel for the application but nothing can really substitute for the real thing. Also, it is as you note citizen commentary rather than journalism. I make use of the global news media to provide a “mainstream perspective”, the individual contributors provide a more individual and personal perspective frequently on topics that the mainstream media often neglect or simply remain unaware of.

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